E 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




DDD1E4DE17A 



THE GRAND CANYON OF 
THE COLORADO 



BOOKS BY PROF. JOHN C. VAN DYKE 



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New Guides to Old Masters. Critical Notes on the 
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American Painting and Its Tradition. As represent- 
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Nature for Its Own Sake. First Studies in Natural 
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The Desert. Further Studies in Natural Appearances. 
With Frontispiece. 12mo 
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The Opal Sea. Continued Studies in Impressions and Ap- 
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THE GRAND CANYON OF 
THE COLORADO 



THE GRAND CANYON 
OF THE COLORADO 



RECURRENT STUDIES IN IMPRESSIONS 
AND APPEARANCES 



BY 

JOHN C. VAN DYKE 

AUTHOB OP "the DESKBT," " THE OPAL SEA,' 

"the moxjhtaik," etc. 



WITH ILLTJSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1920 



r72i 

.TZf 



COPTBIQHT, 1920, BT 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published February, 1920 



MAS -8 1920 




2)C1,A559985 



^'VX 



' I 



PREFACE-DEDICATION 

TO 

MARIE EDGAR 

Up from the sea, from the fogs and mists of the 
Atlantic, the flat basin of the Mississippi, the plains 
of Kansas, and the low divides of eastern Colorado I 
Up to the great stretches of the Plateau Country 
where the sky is unending, the light unfailing, 
and the clean air still blows over an unbroken 
wilderness ! 

Up from the gasolene and dust of the city, the 
screech of motor and engine, the bustle and roar of 
human endeavor, the shuffle of feet, the chatter of 
life! Up to the glow of the Painted Desert, the 
shadow of the Tusayan Forest, the color of the 
Grand Canyon — the open spaces where Nature still 
rules supreme and man is merely a fretful midge 
quite unable to disturb her majestic repose. 

Up, too, if only for a breathing spell, from the 
aftermath of the war, with its clash of counsel, its 
play for advantage, its refinement of futility. The 
Eastern skies are not yet clear. Though the smoke 
of battle has lifted, the din of discord still is there 
and hatred dwelleth in Babylon. But here in the 



VI PEEFACE-DEDICATION 

glowing West Nature speeds her methods with quiet 
unconcern. She is not shaken by the whirlwind. 
The sweet influences of her Pleiades are not bound, 
nor the bands of Orion loosened, nor the morning 
stars stilled from singing together. Oh ! the great 
sanity of her poise, the calmness of her mood, the 
serenity of her visage splendid ! 

Was there ever a time in human history when 
a return to Nature was so much needed as just 
now ? How shall the nations be rebuilded, the lost 
faith and hope renewed, the race live again save 
through the Great Mother whom we have forsaken ? 
She lays the warp and binds the woof and speeds 
the splendor of the world, let man do what he may 
to mar her work. How shall w^e live without her? 

Need I then apologize for calling your attention 
to her forms and faces, her lights and colors, her 
methods of building and stages of development here 
at the Grand Canyon ? She never stops from labor; 
the Canyon is still in process of building; here you 
may see the Mother of Marvels at her work. How 
calmly and easily she toils! This chasm of the 
earth has been called a wonder, and rightly enough, 
but does not some of the wonder of it lie in the 
serene patience that has gone to its making ? 

Running water, the smooth-edged winds, and the 
silent frost have been the only tools used here, 
but through the slow years that have gone by and 



PREFACE-DEDICATION Vll 

ceased to be the Great Gorge has been wrought in 
form stupendous. A whole mountain range has 
been, not heaved up from the plateau, but cut out of 
it — cut in intaglio. The hardness of the materials 
with the softness of the tools but emphasize the 
wonder of the work. A sermon in patience lies in 
the stone if we shall read it aright. 

But there is also a song. For this plateau in- 
taglio has been cut with lines of flowing grandeur, 
rounded with perfect contours, cast in an arabesque 
of colossal rhythm. The full delirium of song, how- 
ever, lies in its spread of color. You shall not look 
upon its like again, for the world elsewhere does not 
show it. The gray-green surface of the earth has 
been broken through here and the rose and gold of 
the underlying strata are revealed. The high face- 
walls stand 

"Mocking the air with colors idly spread" 

and the air itself responds with veilings of lilac 
and purple. The gamut of color at the Canyon 
seems to have no beginning, no ending. The song 
outsoars the sermon. 

Again need I apologize for attempting to point 
out this majestic beauty ? It has lain here unheeded 
for so many centuries while the generations have 
gone to the shades worn out with their own vanities. 
Will they never turn again to the beauty of the 



VIU PREFACE-DEDICATION 

world? Though we call in vain, still let us call. 
If only one should heed and know a new joy in 
this Canyon splendor, would that not be worth the 
effort? 

John C. Van Dyke. 

Dbsebt View, 1919. 



CONTENTS 

Preface-Dedication v 

CHAFTEB 

I. The Rim 1 

II. Magnitude and Scale 11 

ni. Canyon Carving 24 

rV. Arena-Making 37 

V. The Great Denudation 47 

VI. The Canyon Walls 57 

VII. Buttes and Promontories 75 

VIII. Bright Angel and Hermit Trails .... 90 

IX. Other River-Trails 106 

X. The Colorado 122 

XI. Night in the Canyon 134 

XII. Rim Views 144 

XIII. Grand and Desert View 156 

XIV. From Dawn to Dusk 171 

XV. The Tusayan Forest 181 

XVI. The Cliff-Dwelleb . 196 

XVII. The Discovery 205 



IX 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

Plate 1. The Battleship from El Tovar 6 

Plate 2. Bright Angel from El Tovar 8 

Plate 3. Buttes from El Tovar 14 

Plate 4. Cathedral Stairs, Hermit Trail 20 

Plate 5. Granite Gorge from Plateau Point 32 

Plate 6. Hermit Creek Below Falls 34 

Plate 7. Lateral Canyons 40 

Plate 8. High Walls 44 

Plate 9. A Dry Wash 50 

Plate 10. Northwest from Near Pima Point 54 

Plate 11. Cross-Section, Grand Canyon Strata .... 58 

Plate 12. From Yavapai Point, Looking North. ... 60 

Plate 13. The Cathedral 76 

Plate 14. Colorado River from Foot of Bright Angel 

TraU 82 

Plate 15. Bright Angel Trail, Upper Part 92 

Plate 16. Hermit Trail, River End 102 

Plate 17. Hermit Trail, Near Gorge 108 

Plate 18. On Tonto Trail 118 

Plate 19. Granite Gorge 124 

Plate 20. Hermit Creek, Lower Reach 128 

xi 



xii ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

Plate 21. From Cathedral Stairs, Looking Northwest 136 

Plate 22. The Lookout 140 

Plate 23. Sunset from Hopi Point 148 

Plate 24. Pima Point, Looking West 152 

Plate 25. Across from Yaki Point 158 

Plate 26. From Near Grand View 162 

Plate 27. Clouds in Canyon 174 

Plate 28. Canyon in Fog and Snow 178 

Plate 29. On the South Run 184 

Plate 30. A Tonto Platform 192 

Plate 31. Navaho Indian at Rim 198 

Plate 32. Canyon in Snow-Storm 202 

Plate 33. Where Cardenas Fu-st Saw the Canyon . . 208 

Plate 34. Map of Grand Canyon Region 212 



THE GRAND CANYON OF 
THE COLORADO 



THE GRAND CANYON 

CHAPTER I 
THE RIM 

The unexpected happens at the Canyon. Sur- 
prise, wonder, amazement are looked for, but one 
hardly counts upon fear. In common with the 
average visitor, upon arrival you hurry up the 
steps from the station, pass along the front of the 
hotel, and go out at once to the Rim for a first 
view. You are impatient of delay in seeing this 
marvel of the world. Almost before you know it 
you are at the edge. The great abyss, without hint 
or warning, opens before your feet. For the mo- 
ment the earth seems cleft in twain and you are 
left standing at the brink. As you pause there 
momentarily the rock platforms down below seem 
to heave, the buttes sway; even the opposite Rim 
of the Canyon undulates slightly. The depth 
yawns to engulf you. Instinctively you shrink 
back. If it were not for the presence of com- 
panions you might cry out. 

Ah ! the terror of it ! 

And, worse than that, the mad attraction of it, 

1 



THE GEAND CANYON 



the dread temptation that lies within it! The 
chasm repels and yet draws. What does it me;an? 
Why before this most prodigious beauty of the 
world does one feel tempted to leap over the edge ? 

It is true you do not, but your heart pounds un- 
comfortably and perhaps you grow a little whey- 
faced. For a moment you doubt your sanity and 
question if you are not on the knife-blade edge be- 
tween the rational and the irrational. You hold 
tightly to a tree or the back of a bench and try to 
appear indifferent. But the mere suggestion is 
disturbing. Why should one think such mad 
thoughts here at the Canyon ? 

After a few minutes perhaps you draw a step 
nearer and take a more cautious peep into the 
depth, A cliff-swallow cuts by your head with a 
quick flirt of wing and goes out over the edge. 
You watch him with a strange, apprehensive feel- 
ing. He will almost surely fall or be drawn down 
into that gulf. But no. He speeds on serenely, 
chases his fellows down into the depth, comes up 
again into the blue like a shaft shot from a bow. 
He is at home here, over or under the walls. He 
knows no fear or lure or temptation. 

An Indian dog from the Hopi house near at hand 
trots along the edge looking for his master. Ap- 
parently he cares nothing about the precipice be- 
side him. Instinctively he places his feet just 



THE RIM 



right, whether travelling along the rocky Rim or 
along a trail in the forest. If one should take him 
by the collar and try to drag him or push him over 
the edge, a struggle and a fight would develop at 
once. He knows the cliff and has no notion of 
going over it either voluntarily or involuntarily. 
But he has no fear of it. 

Presently you discover the dog's master out on 
a point of projecting rock — out on a pinnacle that 
seems almost as though it were tottering. He is 
wigwagging with a white flag to some party across 
the Canyon on the North Rim, ten miles or more 
away. He stands on the very verge of the pin- 
nacle. A single misstep, a momentary dizziness, 
and he is over. But he stands perfectly still; he 
does not reel. He, too, is at home here at the 
Rim. He has no feeling of fear and not the slight- 
est thought about suicide or insanity. 

None of the Children of the Sun understand such 
a thing as attraction by repulsion. To fear the 
abyss and yet be possessed by a mad desire to 
plunge within it does not come into their heads. 
Nor do they know that subtler charm that draws 
stronger than dread — the delight of swaying out 
and down through that blue-violet air, swaying 
into eternity without a pause or interruption and 
with not a particle of doubt about the instant at- 
tainment of Nirvana ! Did not the followers of the 



4 THE GEAND CANYON 

Emir Musa cast themselves down from the high 
walls of the City of Brass, crying to the houris be- 
low : " By Allah ! Thou art fair " ? Death does not 
always appear as a fleshless skull. It sometimes 
comes disguised as beauty and with the lure of 
the siren. 

But does not that way lie madness? Is it the 
fear of the gulf so much as the fear of self — the fear 
that you may yield to an irrational impulse? You 
shrink back from the thought even more than from 
the fact and cling to your sanity with a more ner- 
vous grip than you have upon the back of the 
bench. Then gradually you return somewhat to 
yourself. The terror of the abyss is not in the 
Canyon but in your over-sensitive nerves. Civili- 
zation has keyed you up to the snapping-point, and 
here in the presence of a great sensation you feel 
the strain. 

There is company for your misery just here, for 
almost every one at the Canyon for the first time 
knows this impulse. After a few days a normal 
poise is regained and perhaps you forget yourself 
in the greatness of your surroundings. Nature is 
always making repairs on the human as upon her 
other creations. She helps him back to sanity and 
sound nerves as soon as he leaves the house for the 
open. Still, even after you have arrived at self- 
composure you have an uneasy feeling about others. 



THE RIM 



You cannot bear to see any one standing too close 
to the edge. You look the other way. And any 
one doing stunts from a point of overhanging rock 
makes you angry. And rightly enough. The most 
expert climbers here at the Canyon crawl along 
ledges on their hands and knees where, if it were 
not for that sheer descent, they would walk upright 
and steadily. One takes precautions. Eventually 
he becomes like the swallow and the Indian — that 
is, fearless but not foolish. 

The Canyon is perhaps what might be called a 
natural rather than an artificial hazard. There is a 
difference. It is not probable that the city dweller 
(or for that matter the dog or the Indian) will ever 
conquer a disagreeable feeling in looking over the 
edge of a thirty-story sky-scraper into a canyon 
street. That may be because there is possibly 
some madness in both the building and the street 
that spurs on his own incipient mania. But there 
is no madness in Nature and no terror in her preci- 
pices once we have the fumes of civilization out of 
our brain and have returned to the normal life. 

That is not to say that Nature at the Canyon or 
elsewhere does not occasionally indulge in extrava- 
gances. The view from El Tovar (Plates 1, 2, 3) is, 
at the very start, anything but normal. The Eng- 
lish visitor gasps over it and perhaps takes the next 
train out. Landscape to him means much foliage. 



6 THE GRAND CANYON 

a sunlit lawn, flat water for reflection, distant hills, 
some bowling white clouds against a blue sky. 
That is usually considered a livable landscape. 
And so it is. But there is nothing livable, nothing 
intimate about the Canyon. It is not a park or 
coimtryside scene, but a spectacle, a panorama — 
Nature in her most dramatic mood using her pageant 
properties with a prodigality of splendor almost un- 
thinkable. It is a tremendous show, and to carry 
it off effects are employed that may be thought 
little short of theatrical. To illustrate: 

The rock forms are florid, fantastic, flamboyant, 
and yet planned on so vast a scale that they are 
impressive and commanding through sheer mass. 
The colors are hectic, sky-flushed, fire-fused, per- 
haps leached and bleached by rain or flung off in 
vivid tones by blazing sunlight. Sometimes a ver- 
milion-red glows beside a fire-green, while at other 
times, so subtle is the blend that you cannot draw 
a line between gold and orange or purple and mauve. 
The lights shift almost like the footlights in a ballet, 
showing a silver, a saffron, a pink, a heliotrope. 
The mornings are perhaps all blue and gold; the 
evenings all rose and violet. As for the atmospheres, 
the Canyon depths will reveal aerial blues at almost 
any time, but at dawn and sunset the envelope may 
thicken to a haze of pale gold or lilac or purple, 
and with dusk it sinks into a strange night blue. 




From a photograph, copyrighted by Fred Harvey. 

Plate 1. THE BATTLESHIP FROM EL TOVAR. 

jSIaricopa Point left, Dana Butte middle shadow, arenas in Red Wall in 
sunlight. Battleship right foreground. 



THE RIM 



The Colorado! Why, yes; this is the valley it 
has cut, and the River itself is down there, but you 
cannot see it! Vi^en later, from some projecting 
point, you gain a first glimpse of it there is some 
disappointment. It looks like a thread of golden 
metal inlaid at the bottom of a purple bed. Its 
surface appears smooth, but if you continue to look 
at it steadfastly you will notice tiny moving flecks 
of light upon it. These flecks and quivers are the 
foam-crests of waves. And as the wind shifts and 
eddies in toward you there comes up a faint and 
far roar — a sinking and rising roar. The swift-rush- 
ing river is dashing and flashing its way to the sea, 
but it is so far off that you grasp neither its form 
nor its fury. 

In addition to these Canyon peculiarities the 
varying meteorological appearances are startling. 
The sunrises and the sunsets, especially in summer, 
are preternatural in their brilliancy and almost 
raving in their color splendor. Frequently on hot 
afternoons dark clouds drift across the Canyon, 
letting down great fringed sheets of rain that melt 
into silvery mists. Blue-violet lightning flashes 
down into the depth and runs in rivulets among the 
buttes. Rainbows not only arch the passing showers 
from Rim to Rim, but the spectrum hues sometimes 
appear at noonday, straight overhead in the ice- 
clouds of the feathery cirrus, with no rain what- 



8 THE GRAND CANYON 

ever falling and with no arching bow. The scene 
is sometimes varied still further by clouds that form 
within the Canyon and slowly rise toward the Rim, 
breaking and dissipating as they rise, or by fogs 
that bank the Canyon full to the lip; and far down 
to the east, where the river turns coming out of 
the Marble Canyon, is the Painted Desert, and out 
of that at sunset occasionally come clouds of sand, 
purple-hued, lightning-riven, reaching up to the 
clouds of heaven, marching with a roaring wind 
across the desert, across the Little Colorado, and 
spilling down into the Canyon from the height of 
Comanche Point. 

The unusual and the spectacular are everywhere, 
for, all told, the Canyon is Nature^s most colossal 
piece of stage-setting. The Great Goddess has here 
put carmines on her cheeks, jewels at her throat, 
and robed herself in her most astounding livery. 
Day after day she stands in the great spot-light of 
the sun, revealing her majestic beauty and her in- 
comparable splendor. Around her are golden and 
garnet hued walls, below her are purple depths, 
above her is the azure immensity. A rose-and-lilac 
atmosphere makes of them all a wondrous har- 
mony. Serene she stands, as young, as radiant, 
and as beautiful as at the earliest day. Never for 
a moment does she lose her serenity. For all her 
gay display her repose is not ruffled. In the final 




From a photograph, copyrighted by Fred Harvey. 

Plate 2. BRIGHT ANGEL FROM EL TOVAR. 

Battleship in shadow, Bright Angel Trail below, Turtlehead right middle 
distance, North Rim on horizon. 



THE RIM 9 

analysis that repose is, here as elsewhere, her most 
dominant and impressive quahty. 

Naturally, after so much that is amazing and 
some that is harrowing, one at first is more or less 
bewildered. You cannot step out of the monotony 
of a railway-car and, walking a few steps, enter 
upon something that is the last word in grandeur 
and sublimity without catching your breath and 
gasping a bit. Some people stand and stare with 
their mouths ajar, some whistle or talk uncon- 
sciously to themselves, some sit down and softly 
swear. But all are bewildered. They cannot 
grasp it. Nature seems out of joint. The walls 
are all precipices, the buttes are all carved and 
isolated peaks, the colors are madly mixed, and as 
for that weird River, it is so deep-sunk in fire-rock 
that it cannot be seen, and, though it never ceases 
from roaring, it cannot be heard. Destruction, 
desolation, and silence are on every hand. 

And so, bewildered and dazzled, you go in to 
breakfast. 

But give yourself a little time and you will gain a 
different point of view. The scene will apparently 
readjust itself. You will understand that it is 
abnormal, dramatic, spectacular, and judge it ac- 
cordingly. Then you will see that everything at 
the Canyon, and in this Great Plateau country 
out of which it is carved, is all of a piece and goes 



10 THE GBAND CANYON 

together quite perfectly. It is a different geologi- 
cal surface and period from what you have been 
accustomed to, but it is thoroughly harmonious 
within itself. Eventually you will see that the 
great cleft valley has majesty, the buttes and walls 
dignity, the strata waving grace, the colors both 
charm and sublimity. The Canyon comes together 
after its kind, making a harmonious, self-sustaining 
picture, ideally panoramic, and all the more im- 
pressive for its size, its brilliancy of light, and its 
burning color splendor. 



CHAPTER II 
MAGNITUDE AND SCALE 

At first we cannot see things here at the Canyon 
for their vastness. The mind keeps groping for a 
scale of proportion — something whereby we can 
mentally measure. Standards of comparison break 
down and common experience helps us not at all. 
The size of Crater Lake in Oregon or Mt. Shasta 
in California is gathered somewhat from walking 
around it, but the more one walks about the Can- 
yon the vaster it becomes. Distance seems bound- 
less. 

The two-foot rule has to be abandoned, and even 
the scale of miles seems to serve us but indiffer- 
ently. We are told that the Canyon is a mile deep, 
that it is twelve or more miles across, that it is 
two hundred and twenty miles from the Marble 
Canyon to the Grand Wash; but how much does 
that mean to us? By the same token, Spencer 
Terrace and Fiske Butte make up a mere two-mile 
promontory that reaches out from the foot of Mt. 
Huethawali toward the River; but those two miles 
lead over a flat stone floor, hard as iron, and with 
the indication of many thousand feet of similar 

11 



12 THE GRAND CANYON 

solid rock beneath it. The distance in miles means 
nothing, but the tread upon that bare rock, the feel 
of the foot, brings home an unforgettable impres- 
sion of the solidity and substance of the earth's 
surface. No; figures do not help us. A painter 
who could not do a sum in vulgar fractions would 
comprehend the Canyon more readily than a 
mathematician. 

We go back to comparisons with other scenes of 
huge proportions. We multiply the Yellowstone or 
the Yosemite and countersink the Himalayas, seek- 
ing a resemblance to the Great Gorge, but the imagi- 
nation does not respond. The abrupt end of the 
Muir Glacier in Alaska offers faint suggestion of 
sheer descent, and the wall of the Catskills facing 
the Hudson indicates what the Canyon may be- 
come thousands of years hence; but the likenesses 
are strained and feeble. There are cliff walls in 
the Rockies more rugged than these, more gray 
and forbidding in color, more massive in sheer 
power; but again they evoke no imagery, sustain 
no analogy. The wonders of the world are brought 
forth in vain. There is no similarity. The Can- 
yon is unique — in a category by itself. 

Then spring up the grotesqueries of the multi- 
tude. Some one talks about the Washington 
Monument and how small it would look among 
these buttes; another puts a Brooklyn Bridge 



MAGNITUDE AND SCALE 13 

across the Inner Gorge; and perhaps a third arrives 
at a scale of size by throwing Niagara into the Can- 
yon and then feigning to look for it with an opera- 
glass. But again the mind does not rise to these 
exaggerated parallels. In fact it is rather deadened 
by them, as by the thousands of years it would 
take that railway-train to reach the nearest fixed 
star. It arrives at things in a more elementary 
way and is finally impressed by commoner facts, 
such, for instance, as the sage-brush on the Battle- 
ship (Plate 1) below you not being sage-brush but 
trees (pinyons) fifteen feet high, or the great length 
of time it takes an eagle to cross a side-canyon and 
finally swing up and alight on a pinnacle of rock. 

Next in order is the architectural parallel — some- 
thing that seems to meet with favorable reception 
in almost every quarter. It is usually associated 
with mythological allusion, and out of the two is 
squeezed a pseudo-poetry, a hybrid romance. It 
seems that years ago, when this country was young 
and defenseless, some people more or less in au- 
thority broke in on the Canyon and exhausted the 
pantheon of gods in giving names to the buttes and 
promontories; and now every one who talks or 
writes about the Canyon from necessity uses archi- 
tectural term and mythological name to point his 
meaning. The result is that these enormous Can- 
yon forms are dwarfed to the building plan of a 



14 THE GEAND CANYON 

Buddhist temple and the great goddess Nature is 
put out of countenance by the blinking little divini- 
ties of India and Egypt. 

The inadequacy, not to say absurdity, of such a 
parallel becomes apparent when it is realized that 
some of these buttes stand five thousand feet from 
base to summit and that no "temple/* past or 
present, measures up one-tenth of that height. 
The association does not enlarge but rather belittles 
the Canyon. For when one writes 

" The robin^s breast 
Was colored like the sunset west " 

the comparison appeals to the imagination and 

makes of the robin^s breast something wonderfully 

brilliant. But if one puts it the other way around 

and writes 

" The sunset west 
Was colored like the robin's breast " 

the comparison of the greater to the less makes a 
very small and weak affair of the sunset west. Just 
so here in this stupendous slash in the earth's crust. 
The buttes and isolated points that have been loom- 
ing heavenward in majestic isolation for thousands 
of years before the coming of the Pale Face, are 
not made more grand or comprehensible by liken- 
ing them by name to the squat temples of Buddha 
or Shiva or Zoroaster. 




From a photograph, copyrighted hy Fred Harvey. 

Plate 3. BUTTES FROM EL TOVAR. 

Battleship in shadow, Granite Gorge central, Shiva at left, Isis middle 

distance, Cheops right. 



MAGNITUDE AND SCALE 15 

And where, by the way, are the temples of Zoro- 
aster? And what eye has seen a "tower'' of Set or 
of Ra? There were pylons in Egj^tian architec- 
ture but no towers, and the Fire- Worshippers may 
have had temples, but to-day the place thereof 
knows them no more. And in any event what have 
these dead-and-gone gods, what have such operatic 
divinities as Wotan and Brunhilde to do with this 
Western wonder? The "temples'' of the gods and 
beside them the "castles" of Guinevere and the 
Queen of Sheba ! What a lugging in by the ears of 
questionable characters ! 

Why, if it were necessary to put a brand on the 
Canyon walls and buttes, were they not named for 
the Indians, as "Coconino Plateau" or "Pima 
Point," or after the Spaniards, as "Tovar Butte," 
or with just plain descriptive titles, such as " Grand 
View" or "Cedar Mountain"? But evidently the 
parlor-car poet was abroad in the land and in con- 
sequence the mock-heroic and the absurd have been 
put upon the map. A series of numbers would 
have been less agonizing and quite as poetic. 

Poetry and the Canyon ! How very far removed 
they are from one another! In the Harz Moun- 
tains or along the Rhine the legend clings about 
every rock and pool and river, and seems very fit- 
ting, quite in keeping with the gentle face that 
Nature there displays. But what legend is there 



16 THE GRAND CANYON 

about the Canyon, barring the devil lore of the 
Indians, that has ever obtained ? If you suppose it 
known and settled by humanity for a thousand 
years, you still cannot imagine it a place for fairies 
or poets or lovers. What impression could a Venus, 
a Lorelei, or an Isolde make here? In this great 
depth they would appear as the mere butterflies of 
minstrelsy. 

Should one, however, go back and conjure up the 
enormous Genii of the Arabian Nights new possi- 
bilities would immediately arise. ^ Such gigantic 
forms and fantastic characters would be appropriate 
to the Canyon. You can imagine the Genie pent 
up in the Bottle, dragged ashore from the rushing 
waters of the Colorado, and when freed from the 
Bottle expanding in an enormous cloud-like form 
that would fill not only the Inner Gorge but the 
whole Canyon. With such a creation you find the 
spectacular meeting the spectacular. Both the 
Canyon and the Genie are abnormal, colossal, stu- 
pendous; they complement each other in scale and 
go together quite perfectly. 

But mere man, whether romantic or otherwise, 
is no more here than a fly on St. Peter's dome — 
something too infinitesimal to be reckoned with. 
He is not to the Canyon born and has less footing 
in it than the coyote whelped in the wind-worn 
pockets under the Rim or the jack-rabbit that is 



MAGNITUDE AND SCALE 17 

bred on Its lower terraces. And we, if we would 
understand the Canyon, must largely eliminate the 
human element of it. It is insignificant. We can 
get on without it. 

With no adequate scale of proportion for form, 
we are perhaps even worse off when it comes to 
color. For the spread of it here outruns all oiu* 
experience. The cleft of the Yellowstone is a col- 
ored ditch in the forest and the Garden of the Gods 
a front-lawn display compared with it. The Can- 
yon has all their variety and many times their 
quality. At sunset, with the western sky aflame, 
the whole violet arch of the upper space seems to 
fling down its brilliancy on this Plateau Country, 
turning forest, desert, and Canyon into a wide ring 
of splendor. From butte to butte, from Point Sub- 
lime to Cape Final, the great depth glows as though 
inlaid with patines of precious metal and studded 
with half-hidden jewels. The Coconino walls turn 
golden, the Red walls are salmon-hued, the Tonto 
platforms Nile-green, the Unkar beds vermilion-red, 
the Inner Canyon heliotrope-purple. 

These hues run along cliff and butte and point 
and platform in unending sequence. There seems 
no limit to their volume. Over on the Painted 
Desert (Plate 33) and along the Rim of the Marble 
Canyon the sun-shafts and the sky reflection re- 
peat the tale in tones of opal and iridescent fire. 



18 THE GRAND CANYON 

Even the San Francisco Mountains, far away to the 
southeast, respond with an alpen glow from their 
snowy summits. There never was such another 
story of color. 

To compare this display to the sea at sunset is 
not to gain in size, for the horizon ring there is not 
so great as here; and it is not to gain in color, since 
the local hue of the sea is blue-green and the Canyon 
in its rock strata has a thousand local hues to rival 
it. The sea does not help us to comprehension, 
and, as a matter of fact, no one ever thinks of it at 
the Canyon. Nor do we gain any greater under- 
standing by calling the depth "a blue abyss" or 
*'a color dream." The phrases merely point to 
our helplessness in expression. We can do little 
more than stare at it and wonder. 

The wonder is that with this immense gamut of 
tones there is no false note, no discord. How does 
it happen? Every stratum in the Canyon has a 
distinct local note and brings in a separate tale with 
the blare of a thousand bugles blown. Waves of 
scarlet and gold seem set in motion by the rising 
and the setting sun, the light-shot clouds overhead 
fling down reflections of topaz and amethyst, the 
cobalt sky and the blue-green forest are the re- 
verberating backgrounds. How does it happen 
that these great areas of apparently opposed hues 
come together and fuse in a perfect harmony ? 



MAGNITUDE AND SCALE 19 

Is it, perhaps, the atmosphere that strains the 
notes and causes the blend? That atmosphere is 
colored, too, and within an hour's time may pass 
from saffron to rose, or from violet to purple. As 
the air changes, the hues of the walls and buttes 
change to correspond. Dramatic and even theatri- 
cal as is this display, it is always in such perfect 
harmony and upon such a huge scale that the senses 
become more or less intoxicated and people grow 
ecstatic. They exclaim, or tears come to their 
eyes, or they choke up with emotion — suflScient 
proof, perhaps, of the fact that they are in the pres- 
ence of stupendous beauty. 

Form and color are not the only immensities that 
one meets at the Canyon. You are up from the 
sea seven thousand feet, but the sky is no nearer 
to you. Look at it a moment and how very deep 
it seems. You may know its depth by the quality 
of the blue. It is much darker than down at sea- 
level, and is, in fact, faintly tinged with violet. 
How the arch seems to lift into injSnite space! 
Have you ever seen so high a sky? And how low 
down the horizon rim! Standing on the point of 
Grand View it swings around you in a perfect circle. 
You are the centre of the circle and on a level with 
its lowermost edge. From this point you can eas- 
ily see Navaho Mountain a hundred miles away to 
the northeast over the Painted Desert. That is 



20 THE GRAND CANYON 

only one-half the circle. Looking down to the south- 
west you can see, on the edge of the horizon, moun- 
tain ranges that are another hundred miles away. 
That is the other half of the circle. One keeps on 
insisting that everything at the Canyon is on a scale 
quite outside of normal experience. 

And yet with all this colossal scale the forms and 
colors are rightly proportioned each in itself and in 
relation to the others. At first you may be absorbed 
by the great depth of the Canyon. You keep gaz- 
ing down into the abyss and marvelling over the 
tremendous trench that Nature has dug. But the 
depth of the trench is exactly right in relation to 
its width and length. If you narrowed its breadth, 
you would feel a lack of proper balance. The pro- 
portions of the Inner Gorge to the Tonto platforms 
and the platforms to the upper walls would be lost; 
the Canyon would appear as a mere crack in the 
earth's crust. Just so with the colors. The warm 
colors — the reds, golds, and yellows — seem to pre- 
dominate, but they are rightly tempered and har- 
monized by the cool colors — the greens and blues. 
Once more there is unity of effect. 

And, finally, the combination of all these constit- 
uent parts — form, color, air, and sky — is again 
quite perfect. Each element, vast in itself, goes 
out and meets the other elements and blends with 
them into a complete whole. The great size 




From a photograph by A. J. Baker, copyrighted by the Atchison, Topeka and 
Santa Fe Railroad. 

Plate 4. CATHEDRAL STAIRS, HERMIT TRAIL. 

Pima Point right, Cope Butte left foreground. Granite Gorge central, seen 
across ragged cut, buttes in distance. 



MAGNITUDE AND SCALE 21 

and the great blend give us what we call the sub- 
lime. 

Well, it might be thought that out of these huge 
elements would come a hum, a hymn, 

"The stretched metre of an antique song" 

that was once sacred to Orpheus. But no. A 
silence reigns everywhere. The sun comes up over 
the Painted Desert through a haze of spectrum col- 
ors but there is no sound, and it goes down over the 
Uinkaret Mountains in all the glory of crimson and 
purple, but the silence is not broken. In the early 
morning you may hear at certain places the respira- 
tion of the River, or the sough of the pinyons along 
the Rim, or the jangle of the jays in the pines, 
but they are only momentary happenings. There 
may be flying shadows of clouds moving across the 
Canyon, or misty rain falling into its depths (Plate 
27), but these are silent things that creep in and 
out with an imperceptible footfall. The huge tal- 
uses under the upright walls indicate that blocks 
of limestone and sandstone are continually falling — 
being pried off the face of the walls by frost 
and heat. They keep gathering upon the slopes 
below, but you seldom, if ever, see them fall, and, 
quite as seldom hear them. In the Alps one wakens 
in the summer nights with the slide and roar of 
avalanches, but at the Canyon one feels no shock, 



22 THE GRAND CANYON 

is conscious of no sound. The stillness seems like 
that of stellar space. 

X And out of the silence perhaps one gathers the 
feeling of repose. It is in contrast with a feeling 
that there is more or less of chaos and destruction 
going on here. Nature at the Canyon is tearing 
down rather than building up. But in her economy- 
death is just as much a part of the Plan as life. 
For her own purposes she broods and rears and ele- 
vates, and equally for her own purposes she levels, 
she sweeps away, she destroys. Neither working 
of the Plan disturbs her poise or ruffles her composure 
for a moment. Everything is done with calmness. 
A day or a thousand years — what matters it to her ! 
In the fulness of time everything comes to pass as 
appointed. Therefore is there peace, and with it 
repose and silence — the silence that suggests eter- 
nity. 

What a land of mystery ! It is still, hushed, prac- 
tically dead. The violet-purple air hangs over it 
like a royal pall, the white sun cuts it out in strange 
lights and shades as it does the surface of the dead 
moon, the flushed colors that go with decay and 
disintegration are everywhere. Yet here the Great 
Goddess presides, standing beside the grave as be- 
side the cradle. And we can only wonder, because 
we do not entirely understand — because the mind 
cannot rise to so vast a conception. Long associa- 



MAGNITUDE AND SCALE 23 

tion with this Plateau Country may better compre- 
hension: 

"The mind 

Expanded by the genius of the spot 

May grow colossal." 

But there will always be a wonder. 



CHAPTER III 
CANYON CARVING 

The great size of the Canyon has given rise to 
many odd theories regarding its origin. It is diflfi- 
cult to convince people that anything so huge 
could result from ordinary causes. They insist 
that the extraordinary, the accidental, the cataclys- 
mic have been at work here. And, of course, spirits 
of the earth and air have played their part. The 
supernatural is usually invoked when the natural 
is uncomprehended. 

Very likely when Cardenas and his company of 
men came across the deserts and paused abruptly 
here on the Canyon's edge, they thought it the end 
of the earth, or at least a volcanic chasm that rent 
the earth in twain. It was just the kind of place 
to harbor a Satanic contingent, and probably the 
Spanish imagination peopled it with demons. And 
to-day there are some spooky beliefs entertained 
about it. The hotel guides shake their heads and 
talk about suction winds that draw down into the 
depths; of eagles and buzzards that never fly across 
the River, though they swing around under the 
walls; of Phantom Creek and Haunted Canyon 

24 



CANYON CARVING 25 

across from El Tovar; of caves that moan and 
ghosts that groan, and lights that flicker at night. 
There is a bagful of queer stories for those that like 
them. 

The aboriginal tale usually heard relates that 
a great chief who was inconsolable over the loss of 
his wife was taken to see her in the Happy Hunt- 
ing-Grounds by the god Tah-vwoats. The trail 
thither was down the Canyon of the Colorado — 
made by the god for the purpose. He afterward 
brought the chief back to earth, and fearful lest 
others might travel the same Canyon trail, he turned 
a roaring river into it to make the way impassable. 
When Powell came down the Canyon in 1869 the 
Indians still believed the tale — believed that the 
River disappeared in the earth and that no boat 
could pass the rapids and whirlpools set in motion 
by Tah-vwoats. 

There is a white man's tale, attributed to Joaquin 
Miller, that seems to run on all fours with the Indian 
legend, and was probably taken from it. It is in 
substance that the Colorado once flowed under- 
ground, perhaps for many centuries; that it was a 
lost river and, after disappearing, never rose again 
to the light of day; that canoes going down it never 
returned, but were dashed to pieces over subter- 
ranean waterfalls, the musical sounds of which were 
occasionally heard through the rock strata. Miller 



26 THE GRAND CANYON 

was perhaps not responsible for more than the 
theory that the River had run underground for an 
indefinite period and that finally the rock-roof had 
fallen in and exposed the Canyon. The fancy lends 
itself to poetry, but there never was any necessity 
for it as explanation. 

Still another theory is put forth that suggests the 
great trench was originally an enormous crack formed 
by an earthquake, or by contraction of the cooled 
earth-crust, or by subsidence; and that the River, 
taking the line of least resistance, followed the crack 
and deepened its bed to the present proportions. 
But if the great trench had been produced by sub- 
sidence or volcanic action, the sedimentary layers 
of rock in the walls would have been dislocated and 
twisted where they now lie even and match each 
other perfectly across arenas and across the Canyon 
itself. The walls and buttes and canyons would 
have been different one from another in form; and 
volcanic rock, perhaps cinder cones, craters, and 
lava streams would have been apparent. No; 
neither subsidence nor contraction nor volcanism 
offers a way out. 

Nor does the theory of one of the Canyon's oldest 
inhabitants,* that the River basin was the result of 

* Mr. W. W. Bass, who has been "the guide, philosopher, 
and friend" of almost every geologist at the Canyon. Un- 
questionably he knows the geology of the region. 



CANYON CARVING 27 

an anticlinal fold of the rock strata, that the break 
occurred at the point of the sharpest fold, and that 
the River eventually widened the break, help us 
much. Again, some large indication of the fold 
would be apparent in the existing strata if such a 
thrust had ever taken place over a wide area. The 
theory is more or less scientific, but neither the fold 
nor the theory seems to hold water. 

None of these explanations is so acceptable to 
the laity as the one that supposes the whole width 
of the Canyon to have been filled at one time with a 
rushing river — a river a dozen miles wide and a 
mile deep. The most mentally dense can compre- 
hend that the great Canyon could be carved out by 
water, provided there was enough of it. And, of 
course, nothing but a deluge could do the carving 
here shown. 

But there is no more basis, in fact, to the wide- 
river theory than to the Indian legend. A river 
twelve miles across would argue greater rainfall 
than ever came to earth in geological tunes. Had 
there been such a rainfall, all the river-valleys of 
North America would show enormous widths; and 
the Colorado to furnish forth that flood would re- 
quire tributaries many times greater than now ap- 
pear. The immense body of water could never 
have flowed through the narrower canyons lying to 
the northeast, such as the Marble or the Glen Can- 



28 THE GEAND CANYON 

yon. Moreover, so vast a river would run swifter 
and cut deeper in the narrow places than in the wide 
places; the Marble Canyon would have turned into 
a mighty cataract and the Grand Canyon into an 
expanded lake. But there is no evidence that such 
a condition ever existed. Again, the theory is not 
necessary to an understanding. 

The Colorado in all probability was never much 
wider or deeper than it now appears — ^that is, two, 
three, or four hundred feet across and with a depth 
of from perhaps ten to fifty feet (Plate 14). It 
never cut more than its own width. At no time in 
its history did its sand-hued waters wash the bases 
of the present Red Wall or creep up to the foot of 
the El Tovar cliffs whence you are looking down. It 
was always at the b"ottom of an inner canyon hewn 
by its own cutting, just as to-day (Plate 5). The 
rip-saw gash in the rock was made by the River it- 
self and not by an earthquake or an anticlinal fold. 
The cutting power of the River is here extraordinary, 
and yet easily explained by the inclination of its 
bed and the volume of its stream. 

A river in its course to the sea carries with it 
various substances and materials. The floating 
pumice, wood, or other debris carried on the 
surface has little effect upon the river's bed or banks 
and may be dismissed from present consideration. 
The silts and sediments carried in the water, in 



CANYON CARVING 29 

solution and otherwise, have a decided grinding and 
wearing power, and, with great velocity, they in 
time cut out formidable circles, pockets, and chan- 
nels, besides making deposits of mud, sand, and 
gravel upon banks and bars. The greatest wear, 
however, in a rapid stream comes from the sands, 
gravels, and boulders carried in the bed, churned 
along the bottom, and rasped about the encompass- 
ing walls. These form not only a sand-blast under 
water but a battering-ram that breaks through and 
wears down the stoutest rock — even the Archaean 
rock through which the Colorado at El Tovar is 
now running. 

The swiftness of a stream is, of course, dependent 
upon the slope of its bed, and the degree of swift- 
ness (with the volume of the water) sets the pace for 
the boulders that are moved. A river running 
three inches per second will carry with it fine clay, 
six inches per second will shift coarse sand, twelve 
inches per second is sufficient to move pebbles a half- 
inch in diameter, and six feet per second means that 
stones nine inches in diameter can be rolled and 
pushed down the stream-bed. The moving power 
varies as the sixth power of the velocity. A stream 
swift enough to roll a one-pound stone has merely 
to be doubled in swiftness to roll a sixty-four-pound 
stone. The stream that will carry the nine-inch 
stone has a velocity of six feet per second, or about 



30 THE GRAND CANYON 

two and one-half miles per hour. But the Colorado 
at the foot of Hermit Trail has a velocity ten times 
as great, or, say, twenty miles an hour ! 

The abrupt descent of the river-bed in the Grand 
Canyon is very pronounced almost everywhere. 
From the mouth of the Little Colorado to the Grand 
Wash, a distance of two hundred and eighteen miles, 
the fall is one thousand six hundred and forty feet. 
That means a descent of about seven and one-half 
feet per mile. Of course this is not uniform every- 
where. In some flat stretches it is less, and over 
rapids and falls it is more. In the Kaibab division 
of the Grand Canyon the average fall is something 
like twenty-one feet per mile. At one place above 
Grand View the descent is one hundred and thirty 
feet in three-quarters of a mile, and the waves on the 
rapids there are said to be something like thirty feet 
in height. In such places the lifting and rolling 
power of the River is enormous. With its velocity 
it can hurl along boulders weighing tons and crush 
the hardest stone to powder. The striking, break- 
ing, grinding power of these boulders, especially 
in flood-times, is, indeed, difficult to overestimate. 
When you are down at the River take up some of the 
sand that you will see pocketed along the shore and 
you will find it almost as fine as flour. Notice, too, 
the boulders in the stream, how they are rasped 
and rounded. They are being reduced to sand. 



CANYON CARVING 31 

The River is a terrific grinding-mill — a mill that 
never stops. 

Now the most pronounced wear upon a stream- 
bed such as this is vertical — that is, down in the 
channel. The bed if seen in a cross-section would re- 
semble a V. The River is cutting down through the 
dark rock day in and day out, deepening its bed 
at the bottom and widening it at the top. But the 
wear upon the sides is not so great as down in the 
channel. The rub on the walls comes largely from 
what the River carries in its load — that is, sand, silt, 
and mud. The body of this silt is enormous again 
(the River bears to the sea each year more than three 
hundred million tons of it), but it has in itself no 
such grinding power as the stones and boulders 
hurled along in the bed. There is some slight wear 
on the walls from stones as well as silt, and even- 
tually they break down; but, as we shall see pres- 
ently, it is by the saw-through of lateral streams 
and the gradual cutting up of the walls into sec- 
tions that they are disintegrated rather than by the 
River wearing along their faces. 

So much by way of explaining the cutting of the 
inner walls — an explanation which the visitor will 
probably accept, since the Inner Canyon, or Granite 
Gorge, as it is called, does not bother him so much 
as the buttes, platforms, and walls that lie back from 
it and lead up to the Rim. Yet the River in its 



32 THE GRAND CANYON 

initial depression made possible all the breakdown 
and destruction of the side walls and canyons 
and all the carving out of platforms and buttes. 
Water seeks its level, and wherever there is a sink or 
valley or depression of any kind, there the streams 
will pour their gathered forces. The deeper the 
Colorado digs its bed the swifter the descent and 
cut-through of the lateral or side streams. 

It should be repeated and emphasized that no 
stream wears its banks or walls evenly and smoothly 
by direct rubbing — at least, that is not the way 
banks and walls are broken down in this Canyon 
country. The main stream is like the trunk of a tree. 
It has many limbs that run off into smaller branches, 
that in turn trail away into twigs and shoots. The 
walls of the primary canyon are cut through at 
intervals by side-streams that have produced second- 
ary canyons; these in turn are cut at right angles 
by smaller tertiary streams and canyons, and so on 
into infinite ramifications. The plateau areas are 
drained through these subsidiary channels into the 
main trunk-river — the Colorado. As a result of 
this drainage system the plateau is sawn asunder 
by streams. Promontories, points, pinnacles, buttes 
are left outstanding, and, in turn, these are attacked, 
as the main areas were attacked, by small streams 
that eventually break them down. 

Perhaps you will contend that there are no lateral 




From a photograph by F. A. Lathe, copyrighted by the Atchison, Topeka and 
Santa Fe Railroad. 

Plate 5. GRANITE GORGE FROM PLATEAU POINT. 

Tapeats cliff at left, Archsean rock at right, Colorado River 1,200 feet 

below. 



CANYON CARVING 33 

or side streams coming into the Colorado because 
there is no running water in sight. Even on the 
maps one sees only the Little Colorado flowing 
in from the southeast, and a stream called Kanab 
Creek coming down from the northeast that almost 
runs out in dry weather. But there are ten thou- 
sand streams not on the map that run with every 
rain-storm. Look down into any side-canyon and 
you will see their dry beds. Every one of these side- 
canyons was produced by the stream that runs in 
its depth when there is a heavy shower. 

It is a mistake to suppose these creeks unimpor- 
tant because they do not have continuous flowing 
water. On your way down to the River by the 
Bright Angel Trail you will find, below the Indian 
Garden, a canyon cut out of the hard Archaean rock 
by the water that runs here after rains. Across the 
River you can see the enormous gorge called Bright 
Angel Canyon made by the drainage stream there. 
On either side of it you may count a succession of 
extended points, and between each pair of points is 
a tertiary stream draining the adjacent area. Once 
more, when you go down to Hermit Creek Camp 
you will notice half-way down the trail the heading 
of the creek and the great slash that it has made 
through the Red Wall. You may follow down that 
little creek several miles to the Colorado, and per- 
haps be surprised at its course through the rock 



34 THE GRAND CANYON 

(Plate 6), at its upright walls, its contributory side- 
canyons, its water-worn caves, its gouged-out bed. 
Another matter of surprise is the finding of huge 
boulders in the bed that did not drop down from 
the walls overhead, for they are a different kind of 
rock. They were rolled and carried down from the 
Red Wall, the Supai, and the Kaibab strata far 
back toward the Rim. At the mouth of the creek 
where it joins the River you will find the rocks of 
all the strata in all sizes and in all states of wear, 
flung together in confusion — ^flung by the swift 
waters of this little tributary. 

Hermit Creek is a continuous stream, but in fair 
weather it is a small brook running clear, clean water 
that seems quite harmless. In summer you can 
step across it almost anywhere. It is not this quiet 
phase of it that is responsible for the rock-carving 
of its canyon, but rather its turbulent stage when, 
swollen with rains, it rushes along as a mountain 
torrent. All the side-arroyos * then empty water, 
stones, gravel, and sand into it and increase the 
downward rush. Every hollow in between the little 
divides lying off at the sides of the creek contains 
one of these washes. They are usually and normally 
dry, but during periods of rain their flow may be 
very great. For example, back of the Hermit 

* The name is usually applied to the dry beds or courses 
that run with water after rain. 




From a photograph, copyrighted by Fred Harvey. 

Plate 6. HERMIT CREEK BELOW FALLS. 
A lateral canyon In the making, gorge stage. 



CANYON CARVING 35 

Camp buildings you will find a large arroyo leading 
to the east, and if you follow it up you will notice 
evidence everywhere, not only of much water-wear, 
but of tremendous power in the intermittent stream. 
Boulders weighing many tons have been flung about 
and lodged in hollows, beds of coarse stone and 
gravel are washed and heaped up in mounds, leaps 
over high ledges are frequent, and basins beneath 
them offer proof positive of great water- wear. There 
is no doubt about either the size or the force of such 
a stream in wet weather. 

Once more, it is difficult to exaggerate the cutting, 
rolling, rending power of these storm-streams 
(Plate 9). You may be astonished by the steep 
descent of the Colorado — ^the descent that made 
possible its deep-cut bed — ^but that is slight com- 
pared with the downward pitch of some of the side- 
streams. Shinumo Creek, reached by the Bass 
Trail to the west of Hermit Creek, is twelve miles 
long, and in that distance falls five thousand four 
hundred feet, or four hundred and fifty feet in a 
mile.* That in times of great rain argues a torrent 
of terrific power. 

The stream, big and little, has wrought havoc in 
this Plateau Country. Its windings and workings 
must be followed a little farther, for it is responsible 

Noble, L. P., "The Shinumo Quadrangle," Bull. U. S. 
Geol. Survey, 549, Washington, 1914. 



36 THE GRAND CANYON 

not only for the Canyon and the Granite Gorge 
but for all the forms of the walls, the rims, the 
buttes, the promontories. Erosion here is the 
master-movement. 



CHAPTER IV 
ARENA-MAKING 

The bed of Hermit or Shinumo Creek, with its 
tributaries, is more or less typical of every canyon 
in the Plateau Country. The creeks are fed by 
the small arroyos, and the arroyos, in turn, by side 
swales and washes. At its head the arroyo derives 
from a watershed and it is only after it has cut 
down its bed that the side-washes are formed as 
feeders and drainage streams. 

This process carries on regardless of whether the 
area is one of loose gravel or hard rock. If you will 
follow to its source the large arroyo back of the 
Hermit Camp you will find that it is fed by a wet- 
weather stream pouring down from the top of the 
Red Wall. The upper stream is brought together 
on the slopes of the Supai above the Red Wall and, 
pursuing a channel of its own cutting, pours over 
the edge in a waterfall. The fallen water gathers 
together once more on the lower Tonto platform, 
in which it has also cut a channel, and goes down to 
join Hermit Creek, and thus to the Colorado. 
Where it pours over the Red Wall you will find a lip, 
like that of a pitcher, worn in the rock, and under 

37 



38 THE GRAND CANYON 

it a staining of the rock with black and gray lichens 
for several hundred feet. This lip is the beginning 
of a cut-back, a fluting, an arena. 

You will see the lip perhaps oftener and with 
better effect on the walls of the higher strata — the 
Coconino and the Kaibab. For the processes of 
stream-formation, rock-cutting, arena-carving can 
be traced without the least confusion up through 
the various slopes and strata to the Rim of the 
Canyon (Plates 11, 12). Every terrace or slope, 
however steep, is guttered and depressed in places, 
and it is in these depressions that the rain gathers, 
forms into a stream, and runs down over the wall, 
falling on the platforms below. Water is drained 
from roof to roof, from the highest to the lowest — 
the roofs flattening and spreading out in area and 
in watershed as they descend. The steep walls 
of the Kaibab and the Coconino pour water upon 
the slopes of the Supai, the Supai sends its gather- 
ings over the Red Wall upon the Tonto platform, 
which in turn empties its streams into creeks that 
cut through the Archaean walls and finally reach 
the Colorado. 

Now it must have been noticed by the most 
casual of observers that every stream coming down 
a slope or over a wall, by its own wear keeps cut- 
ting back into the slope or wall, grooving or notch- 
ing the rim or edge over which it runs. In the 



ARENA-MAKING 39 



course of time, and with the deepening of the cut, 
the sides of it begin to break away and widen 
through lateral cuts that develop secondary grooves 
and notches. Where the rock is soft, the cutting 
and the widening go on together with swift pace; 
where the rock is hard, the cutting is narrower, 
deeper, producing rather abrupt walls. Thus the 
lateral cut-backs through the Archsean and Tapeats 
walls down at the River are generally sharp, rough 
defiles, narrow paths with vertical sides that one 
cannot go up or down without a rope (Plate 20). 
Above these walls the green shales of the Tonto 
Group are a much softer formation, and the streams 
easily wear them down and back. But not so with 
the next stratum — the Red Wall. Here we have a 
stubborn limestone that does not easily disintegrate. 
The gathered rains go over it in cataracts or waving 
waterfalls, and the upper edge of it is usually marked 
by a lip or narrow trough that pours the water down 
in a compact stream. 

If you locate this lip or trough accurately you 
will find that it is usually in the central depression 
of a quarter-circle. No portion of the Red Wall 
runs on for any distance in a straight line. Every- 
where it bends in and out, is serpentine in projec- 
tions and recessions. The arenas or quarter-circles 
in it were all started by the widening of the lip at 
the back, and each arena in the course of time 



40 THE GRAND CANYON 

continues to widen through smaller lateral cuts 
along its rim (Plate 7). A very large quarter-circle 
in the Red Wall will not only have its large trough 
and stream-bed at the extreme back but have also 
several lateral lips and beds formed, or forming, on 
its sides. Thus the arena is broadened and en- 
larged, often to great size, by the cut-backs of the 
half-dozen or more streamlets that pour over its 
edge (Plate 8). 

Higher up on the walls there are waves and cres- 
cents cut in the Supai formation, above the Red 
Wall; but the sandstone and shale there is softer 
than the limestone, and the arena forms in it are not 
so large. They are too easily broken down to en- 
dure long in quarter-circle form. The appearance 
then on the Supai slopes is that of smaller serpen- 
tine windings — ^windings of the walls and ins and 
outs of the various layers. The same kind of 
erosion goes on there as with the Red Wall below, 
but the cutting is faster and more uniform, since 
the tendency of the water is to come down a series 
of steps as well as in a series of t oughs or depres- 
sions in the slopes. It is the broad wash from these 
red Supai steps that pours down the face of the 
Red Wall, staining it and making it appear as a 
red wall, although in reality it is a blue-gray lime- 
stone. 

Above the Supai shales come the hard, abrupt 



ARENA-MAKING 41 

walls of the Coconino sandstone and the Kaibab 
limestone, the latter being under your feet as you 
stand on the Rim. The water-wear on these upper 
walls is similar to that upon the Red Wall below — 
that is, the wear is in the most recedent portion of 
the Rim where the rain gathers and pours over the 
edge from a lip or trough. The tendency here as 
elsewhere is to form the arena, the half or quarter 
circle. Look along the Rim from where you stand 
and you will discover that it runs in flutings like a 
Doric column. Sometimes these flutings or arenas 
are not fifty feet across. They are, in fact, of all 
sizes. A small one shows directly in front of the 
hotel where you go to see the Canyon for the first 
time. On the way from the hotel to the head of 
Bright Angel Trail is a larger one that looks like 
an irregular crescent cut in the Rim. The middle 
of it — the point farthest back in the Rim — is just 
in front of the Bright Angel Camp. A stream runs 
there in wet weather and keeps cutting back, deep- 
ening the crescent. Around the edge of the cres- 
cent you can see on rainy days other little streams 
running together and finding ways by tiny lips over 
the edge and down the wall. These again are the 
beginnings of lateral cut-backs. 

Now the whole Rim of the Canyon, on both 
sides of the River, is fluted and indented, notched 
with crescents of more or less pronounced character. 



42 THE GRAND CANYON 

The arena formation is, in fact, characteristic of 
every wall hereabouts. The one to the left of the 
hotel to which attention has been called is only a 
small one. It is an arena within an arena. You 
do not perhaps see the larger one because of its 
bulk. It runs from Hopi Point to Yavapai Point 
— a distance of several miles. The hotel buildings 
stand in the recess of it. Where is the stream-bed 
that originally cut it back ? Why, just to the west 
of the head of Bright Angel Trail. The trail lower 
down follows the stream-bed all the way to the 
River. It was this stream that not only created the 
larger arena but was responsible for the lateral 
canyon down which the trail runs (Plate 2). 

Every one of the side-canyons here was started 
as a lip in the rock, became a crescent, and to this 
day many of them keep the semblance of the crescent 
form. That is to say, they are great indentations 
between outstanding points. The stage of begin- 
ning with a half or quarter circle is apparent every- 
where. As for the water-wear, that, too, is so ap- 
parent, so obvious, that one asks naturally enough: 
Why is there so much more of it here than else- 
where? Why the torn arroyo, the slashed canyon, 
the cut and carved strata ? 

It is not difficult to answer those questions. The 
Plateau Country through which the Canyon runs 
is largely desert in character. The infrequent 



AKENA-MAKING 43 



rain, the thin soil, the high altitude all combine 
against any pronounced growth of vegetation, and 
there are great areas where practically nothing at 
all grows. Pines, pinyons, and junipers make 
something of a show along the Rim, but the trees are 
wide apart and rather stunted in growth; the under- 
brush is scattered, and as for the mosses and grasses, 
they appear only in small clumps and beds. 

The rainfall here is not nearly so great in the 
aggregate as along the Atlantic Coast; but what 
rain there is, usually falls in heavy showers, often 
in what are called "cloudbursts." It descends in 
torrents for perhaps an hour, and then stops. Fall- 
ing upon a rocky bed, or one with only a few inches 
of soil-covering, there is no chance for it to sink in 
anywhere. Neither is there sufficient grass, moss, 
or undergrowth to check its run-off. Immediately 
it begins to gather in countless little streams. And 
each stream as it runs carries with it sand and 
gravel which it empties into a larger stream. The 
force is cumulative, and the descent down the 
slopes to the secondary and lateral canyons and 
thus to the River is very swift. Each stream be- 
comes a Colorado in miniature, battering and saw- 
ing its way along its bed, carrying what it cuts and 
loosens down to the greater River. No wonder the 
Plateau landscape is guttered and cross-guttered 
with arroyos and barrancas — canyons in little. 



44 THE GEAND CANYON 

The Grand Canyon is the direct result of an ero- 
sion that has been going on for hundreds of cen- 
turies. Water is sufficient in itself to account for 
the great bulk of the destruction here apparent. 
And yet there are other causes that help on the 
general drag-down of the walls and add to the 
tale of ground rock that is carried each year from 
the Plateau to the sea. 

The driving rains that beat directly against the 
faces of the Kaibab, the Coconino, and the Red 
Wall seem very futile in their fury. The walls 
throw them off easily enough, shunt them into the 
streams. But there is always a certain amount of 
damage done. In summer the rains beat into the 
seams and cracks of the rock and dissolve some of 
the cementing material that binds the grains to- 
gether. Disintegration sets in. Certain particles 
are carried off by the drip of water; other particles 
are loosened and fall down as sand. Again, rain 
running down a face-wall follows the wall into hol- 
lows and caves, creeping and seeping along the ceil- 
ing, and perhaps finally dropping far within the 
cave. This once more produces a solution and a 
falling of rock particles from the ceiling as sand. 
Almost every shallow cave that one enters in this 
Canyon region will show a floor covered with sand — 
sometimes several feet of it. 

Another process of destruction goes on in winter 




From a photograph, copyrighted by Fred Harvey. 

Plate 8. HIGH WALLS. 

Arenas and dry creek-beds across River, Colorado and Granite Gorge be- 
low, Kalbab walls at right. 



ARENA-MAKING 45 



with the freezing and thawing of rain and snow 
lodged in the crevices of the rock strata. Layers 
and sections of the wall are thus pried away from the 
main face and, in time, fall as blocks upon the taluses 
below. Eventually these blocks push down into 
the valley, become smaller, flatten out on the slopes 
or are ground to sand in the swift-running streams. 
Not only the walls but the buttes, the pinnacles, 
the ledges, the platforms, all suffer from frost. 
It is true that Nature tries to mitigate the damage 
and hold off destruction by growing wherever she 
can bushes, grasses, flowers, mosses, lichens that 
act as protectors of the stone. It is astonishing the 
places she chooses to grow them. What food there 
may be for plant life in a fissure of rock one hardly 
knows, but one finds flowers and grasses growing 
there almost as a rule rather than as an exception. 
Destruction to the rock is thus for a time stayed. 
But eventually the crumbling and falling process 
carries on. 

Still another process of disintegration follows 
the rasp and cut of the uneasy winds. Always 
they are eddying and circling about the walls, the 
buttes, the spines, the towers, the ridges. They 
creep in and out of crevices and hollows and rush 
around arenas and amphitheatres often with much 
force. Almost everywhere they move, they carry 
or drive with them particles of sand. These are 



46 THE GRAND CANYON 

flung against the walls or driven in an eddy about a 
shallow recess, or hurled with fury around the base 
of pillars. They cut like a miniature sand-blast. 
The result is more destruction. It is greater from 
the action of wind than is generally supposed, be- 
cause it is incessant and wide-spread. No rock 
face escapes the blast. Whether gentle or fierce, 
it rubs and wears away. 

And these rocks at the Canyon are peculiarly sus- 
ceptible to the wear of wind and water. For one 
thing, they lie in horizontal beds, which is not im- 
favorable to erosive processes. Again, they are all 
of them, except those of the Inner Canyon at the 
River, made up of sedimentary deposits and lack 
the consistency of metamorphic and igneous rocks. 
Sandstones and limestones have not the resistant 
powers of schists and gneisses. 

But the rock strata at the Canyon make up such 
an extraordinary story that they require a chapter 
by themselves. 



CHAPTER V 
THE GREAT DENUDATION 

It is matter of common knowledge that the general 
reader does not care to have his story interrupted 
by too much information, scientific or otherwise. 
He looks for entertainment rather than instruction, 
and at the Canyon is perhaps quite willing to forego 
geology except in elementary and homoeopathic 
doses. But geology here is more or less compulsory 
because it is everywhere in evidence, and everywhere 
important. It is the one spot on earth where cer- 
tain rock strata may be read as in a book. It is 
not necessary to apologize for opening the book. 
The geological story is interesting in itself and is its 
own excuse for being. 

The cutting out of the Canyon is the end of the 
story, not the beginning. It happened in late 
times — ^possibly the Tertiary Period — and is geo- 
logically considered a recent occurrence, though no 
one knows how many scores of centuries ago it first 
started. The process of cutting is still going on. 
The River continues to deepen, and in the ages to 
come the Inner Gorge may be cut down nearly to 
sea-level or the Plateau Country may subside, and 

47 



48 THE GRAND CANYON 

perhaps the Canyon itself may then turn into a fiord 
where still blue waters will lie under purple rocks 
and the rushing River will have cut back far into 
Utah or Wyoming. But that is a possible sequel 
to the story, at which we have not yet arrived. 

We are of necessity greatly impressed with this 
latter-day cutting of the Canyon because of its 
colossal scale. It seems an erosion of proportions 
such as the world has never experienced elsewhere, 
and yet it should be stated at once that as compared 
with what preceded it the great chasm is a mere 
scratch in the shell — a minor affair. Before ever 
the Canyon was started this Plateau Country was 
swept by a denudation of vast extent. Over an 
area of about fourteen thousand square miles the 
whole surface was planed off and the beds of five 
geological periods disappeared from the top. At 
the Rim where you stand, under your feet, are 
layers of Carboniferous rocks, and upon these rocks 
were once upbuilded strata upon strata of sedimental 
rocks belonging to the Permian, the Triassic, the 
Jurassic, the Cretaceous, the Eocene. Ten thou- 
sand feet of them were once over your head. Many 
centuries ago they were cut out and swept away in 
what has been called "the Great Denudation." 
That sounds like a statement put forth to make 
people catch their breath, but it is susceptible 
of proof, as we shall presently see. 



THE GREAT DENUDATION 49 

The rock strata seem to be laid down about tbe 
globe very much as the layers or various skins en- 
compass an onion, though, of course, with no such 
regularity or uniformity. In places certain strata 
are missing, were perhaps never laid down. How 
deep down the distance before the strata end is a 
matter of some speculation, but at present geology 
contents itself with something like twelve periods, 
each made up of many layers or beds.* The normal 
and sequential appearance of these beds is often 
greatly disturbed or broken by accidents of upheaval 
and subsidence, flood and fusion. It is so here. The 
onion has had a number of layers gouged or washed 
out of it. Of twelve geological periods at one time 
existent, only six are now to be seen at the Canyon, 
and two of these appear only in remnants and frag- 
ments. There is plain evidence on every hand of a 
great disturbance — a, great denudation. 

When we look across the Canyon from El Tovar 
and see strata of the Kaibab and Coconmo running 
along the North Rim corresponding to the strata on 
our side of the River, we cannot doubt that all the 
strata once extended across the Canyon and were 
somehow broken through, cut out and carried away 
by the River. The likeness holds good for a longer 

* By turning to the cross-section (Plate 11), the reader 
may get the names and order of the periods as far as they 
appear here at the Canyon, They are further indicated in 
the photograph Plate 12. 



50 THE GRAND CANYON 

view — for a view of a hundred miles to the north. 
For up in Utah there still exists a higher Rim — the 
broken face-walls of a greater Canyon — ^the strata 
of which were once spread over the whole Plateau 
Country. The higher Rim in Utah now appears in 
the form of huge cliffs with upright walls. At long 
intervals other cliffs descend from them in a great 
geological stairway, as Button* has put it — descend 
from the highest to the lowest, and stretch out in 
their descent from the lofty plateaus of Utah to the 
depressed basins of Central Arizona. We must 
come down the stairway to the Grand Canyon to 
realize the successive steps — to realize that each 
step in turn has been a temporary water-line during 
successive periods of the Great Denudation. The 
lines of the cliffs are still there. 

The Markagunt Plateau, just over the southern 
Utah boundary-line, is eleven thousand feet above 
sea-level. The Rim at El Tovar is nearly seven 
thousand feet. Some four thousand feet of the lost 
strata are accounted for in that difference of eleva- 
tion, and the remainder is explained by the dip of 
the strata to the northeast which carries the strata 
down instead of up. The strata at El Tovar, it 
will be remembered, are Carboniferous, but on the 
surface of the Markagunt they are Eocene — that 

* Dutton, Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District^ 
Washington, 1882. 




From a photograph, copyrighted by Fred Harvey. 
Plate 9. A DRY WASH. 

It has been cut down from high points at top of photograph, Tapeats rock 

in foreground. 



THE GREAT DENUDATION 51 

is, five geological periods later on, or, as we have 
stated it, about ten thousand feet of strata higher up. 

The top layers of the Markagunt are uniformly 
bedded, lie flat and regular, and are composed of 
lake marls and fresh-water deposits. The face- 
walls, made by the Great Denudation, now appear 
as abrupt cliffs, and the southern line of them along 
the bases of the Markagunt and Paunsagunt 
Plateaus are now known as the Pink Cliffs. They 
are some eight hundred feet high, are rather square- 
edged like pilasters, and run on for many miles like 
an enormous broken colonnade. Their color is a 
brilliant rose-red, which varies under different 
lights, and in general gives a highly spectacular 
appearance to the face-walls. The Eocene ends at 
the foot of these cliffs and is not met with again in 
moving south across the Grand Canyon country 
until we reach New Mexico. The cliffs themselves 
make the first, the top riser, of the geological stair- 
way we have imagined. 

The platform below the Pink Cliffs and extending 
out from under them — ^the lower platform stretch- 
ing away to the south — is made up of Cretaceous 
rock. The layers are of yellow sandstone and clay. 
This is the second step in the stairway, but not so 
abrupt a one as that of the Eocene. The tread of 
the step is not very broad directly south of the Pink 
Cliffs, and when the riser is reached it is not very 



52 THE GRAND CANYON 

high, but this Cretaceous platform extends east- 
ward into the Kaiparowits Plateau and southward 
across Glen Canyon upon the Painted Desert, where 
it appears as the high mesas lying back of Echo 
Cliffs. They may be seen readily enough from 
Desert View (Navaho Pomt). The mesa and the 
flat-topped butte seem more characteristic of the 
Cretaceous than the long file of uniform cliffs, though 
the latter do appear in striking form and color in 
the Paria Valley. 

The third step down is from the Cretaceous to 
the Jurassic. The latter is made up of red shales 
that lie upon a massive thousand-foot bed of white 
sandstone. The sandstone shows in simple bold 
cliffs cut through into detached buttes in places. 
The cliffs appear without taluses, as though rising 
abruptly from an under platform. This simplicity 
is, of course, subject to some variation, and fantastic 
traceries occasionally appear in the Jurassic. The 
most notable appearance of this riser is in the White 
Cliffs of the Virgin. South of the Markagunt and 
Paunsagunt Plateaus the exposures of the Jurassic 
are very grand. It extends eastward under the 
Kaiparowits Plateau, crosses Glen Canyon, and 
appears over on the Painted Desert beyond Echo 
Cliffs and beneath the Cretaceous. But nothing of 
this nor of the Cretaceous or Eocene appears in or 
around the Grand Canyon. 



THE GREAT DENUDATION 53 

The Jurassic and the Triassic are somewhat con- 
fused in their exposures, but it may be generally 
accepted that the Triassic is the fourth step down. 
The great stairway of terraces leading to the Can- 
yon has no more splendid riser than that of the 
Triassic as shown in the celebrated Vermilion Cliffs 
between the Kanab and the Virgin. The color of 
the shales and sandstones is peculiarly brilliant in 
the Valley of the Virgin. Near Pipe Spring these 
cliffs of the Triassic have a height of between fifteen 
hundred and two thousand feet. They appear as 
the main escarpment or face of Echo Cliffs over on 
the Painted Desert, where they often show with 
great color-splendor when struck by the long shafts 
of the setting sun. But again no trace of the Tri- 
assic shows in or around the Grand Canyon. Echo 
Cliffs is the nearest outlier. 

After the Triassic the next platform to which we 
step down is the Permian.* This is the series orig- 
inally laid down upon the Carboniferous — the top 
series at El Tovar. The Permian is a distinct ter- 
race, but not such a typical step as the other forma- 
tions. In fact, the platform which shows the Per- 
mian also reveals much of the Triassic. The Per- 

* Dr. F. L. Ransome, of the U. S. Geological Survey, to 
whom I am greatly indebted for reading the first seven chap- 
ters of this book, in manuscript, reminds me that the U. S. 
Geological Survey makes the Permian the upper division of 
the Carboniferous. 



54 THE GRAND CANYON 

mian beds are thin and of impure limestone, with 
deep colors in belts of pm'ple, violet, lavender, dark 
red, Indian red. They reach down from the Tri- 
assic upon the Kanab and Kaibab Plateaus directly 
north of the Grand Canyon. They appear again 
at the foot of Echo Cliffs on the Painted Desert. 
Remnants or remains of them are still seen about 
the Grand Canyon as survivors of the series — the 
hard cores that have resisted the Great Denudation, 
and now appear in butte form, standing isolated 
upon a Carboniferous foundation. Cedar Mountain, 
a few miles from Desert View, on the Painted Desert, 
is an example. Red Butte, which one sees from the 
railway coming up to the Canyon, is another, and 
Mounts Trumbull and Logan, over to the north- 
west, are a third. The Great Denudation washed 
them into butte form, but could not entirely destroy 
them. 

All this Plateau Country was once under the sea 
— was laid down in horizontal beds as a sea-floor. 
In the fulness of time it rose, or was pushed up by 
lateral pressure, and for many centuries was prob- 
ably a shallow inland sea. As it gradually rose 
above water it became a low alluvial plain, and its 
drainage system was then established by rivers that 
possibly still exist as the Colorado, the Virgin, the 
Paria. The rivers continued to hold their courses 
notwithstanding certain inequalities and deforma- 



THE GREAT DENUDATION 55 

tions that afterward came into existence. They 
were perhaps older than the deformations and 
continued to rmi their ways in spite of the deforma- 
tions, against the strata, against geological faults, 
against dips. They do so yet.* 

The plateau continued to rise and at the same 
time to lose from its upper surface by erosion. The 
so-called Great Denudation extended south from 
the Utah plateaus to the southern deserts of Arizona. 
The geological steps do not stop with the Carbonif- 
erous at the Canyon Rim but continue to descend 
at the south until, on the lower deserts, almost at 
sea-level, we meet with the most ancient forms of 
the Archaean. The denudation took place over a 
vast area and probably carried on through many 
thousands of years. 

And so it came about that the cutting of the 
Grand Canyon itself was an after-happening. For 
all its vast proportions the Canyon was merely a 
drainage ditch in the bottom of the huge basin 
originally hollowed out by flowing waters. It has 
since undergone some minor changes, but evidently 
the Great Denudation was never approached in 
far-reaching results. That was the climacteric 
happening — the supreme event. 

* There is some difference of opinion among geologists as 
to whether certain streams came into existence before or 
after the principal disturbances of the strata. 



56 THE GRAND CANYON 

As for the remaining geological strata or steps in 
the stairway, we do not need to follow them across 
Arizona to the sea. By trailing down into the Can- 
yon we shall find the earliest of all, the old Archaean, 
in the Inner Gorge where the River runs (Plate 5), 
and on the way down we shall meet with the inter- 
mediate strata in the walls. 



CHAPTER VI 
THE CANYON WALLS 

The first five hundred feet of wall at the Canyon 
is called the Kaibab limestone. It can be seen 
exposed in cliff form anywhere under the Rim. It 
belongs to the late Carboniferous period* and shows 
shell life in many of its exposures. Fossil Moun- 
tain, just beyond Havasupai Point, is thickly strewn 
with these shells, but they may also be seen in the 
broken boulders along the Bright Angel Trail a 
hundred feet below the edge. 

On the face-walls of the Kaibab rain and wind 

hollow out many recesses and small caves, though 

the general appearance of the cliff is smooth and 

rather abrupt — sometimes uncomfortably so. For 

this is the "precipice" of the one-day visitor. The 

steep descent, however, is seldom for more than two 

hundred feet. Then the wall breaks down into a 

rough talus where huge blocks are heaped, trees and 

bushes struggle for existence, grasses grow in the 

rock crevices, and flowers sway along the narrow 

ledges and platforms. Sometimes harder portions 

* Called by geologists the Pennsylvanian because it is of 
the same age as the principal coal-bearing beds of Pennsyl- 
vania. 

57 



58 THE GRAND CANYON 

of the walls are seen standing out from the wall 
itself as turrets and pinnacles. A hard cap of 
crystalline limestone usually protects the top of the 
turret from rain while the winds carve the main 
shaft into fantastic form. These pinnacles are 
sometimes known as "dead men" or "hoodoos" 
or "monuments" and are seen in many places along 
the Rim. Thor's Hammer, on the way to Grand 
View, is the popular illustration. 

The Kaibab is seen not merely from El Tovar but 
from every view-point at the Canyon (Plates 11, 12). 
Across on the north side it appears in greater thick- 
ness than near the hotel. Some of the larger buttes 
seen in the Canyon show it. The top cap of the 
so-called Temple of Vishnu, and also of Wotan's 
Throne, is made up of it. These limestone walls 
with their pale-yellow, cream-colored, and warm 
salmon tones undergo great changes with the shifting 
sunlight, especially at sunrise when they become 
golden, or at sunset when they glow with a fire 
orange, or at twilight when they appear amethystine. 
They are beautiful walls at all times and bear their 
part as a top cap to the Canyon strata with dignity 
and grandeur. 

Directly under the Kaibab comes the Coconino 
sandstone, a buff-colored strata some four hundred 
feet thick. This is often cross-bedded — that is, 
laid down in drifts that are at loose angles to each 



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THE CANYON WALLS 59 

other — but it makes up a stubborn rock and a steep 
wall. It is usually seen in perpendicular face with 
no talus or slope below it. Where it rests upon its 
underbasing of Supai formation (well shown at the 
left of Bright Angel Trail below the tunnel, or in 
the basin known as the Inferno) it fits as neatly and 
runs on as smoothly as though set up by a master 
mason. One is somewhat at a loss to understand 
how it could have been so evenly spread under the 
sea, how it could have been laid down so flat and 
flush upon the Supai as though done in a day, and 
how both strata were forced up into the open with- 
out bending, shattering, or breaking in any way. 
Was the rose-gray put down on the Indian red over 
night, or was it deposited, like falling snow, through 
thousands of years, so softly, smoothly, and evenly, 
that to-day, after these many centuries, it lies as 
flat as the sea itself? * 

There are no fossils in the Coconino sandstone 
and, being a supporting wall, there are few outlying 
domes, turrets, or pinnacles. Occasionally portions 
of the wall are split off by frost and there are many 
rounded holes in the face-wall that look as though 
drilled by instruments, but the only tools used were 
the wind and rain. Where the cross-bedding occurs 

* "Some geologists maintain that the Coconino was not 
deposited mider the sea at all, but is a vast accumulation of 
wind-blown sand." — Note by Dr. Ransome. 



60 THE GRAND CANYON 

there are minor faults and breaks which often result 
in caves — wind-worn caves with graceful curves and 
rippled, fine-grained, sandy floors of the most beauti- 
ful golden-pink color. But for all its flexures and 
weatherings the Coconino stands upright with sheer 
faces that are vastly imposing in lift, bulk, and 
weight. It is an extensive wall and one of the most 
prominent in the Canyon strata, because of its light 
color and clean exposure. It runs like a wide ribbon 
under the Kaibab. Across the River you can see 
many miles of it stretching east and west with 
remarkable regularity (Plate 12). Crumbling rem- 
nants of it cap some of the lesser buttes in the Can- 
yon such as Isis and Osiris. 

The Supai formation of sandstone and shale — 
the third group of strata in the walls — is very 
marked in its Indian-red color, and because of its 
enormous bulk it has much to do in determining 
the general color-tone of the Canyon. The red of 
these sandstones and shales shifts and changes 
much under varying lights. In the early morning 
when in shadow it is beef -blood red; at noon it is 
a dark terra-cotta; at sunset almost a fire red. 
These shiftings and changes are well seen at morn- 
ing and evening in the basins known as the Abyss 
and the Inferno, to the west of El Tovar. The 
local color in the wall is due to iron oxide. Many 
of the beautiful harmonies of gold and orange seen 




>— i CD 



THE CANYON WALLS 61 

in the cliffs of the Canyon are caused by just such 
common things as iron oxide — mere iron-rust. 

The Supai is some twelve hundred feet in thick- 
ness and is seen from all points at the Canyon 
(Plate 11). From the hotel Rim the so-called 
Battleship (Plate 1), in its superstructure, is en- 
tirely made up of these sandstones and shales, 
though the base of it (seen from the trail below) is 
the Red Wall. The texture of the beds is a little 
loose and soft, and the walls wash down easily into 
slopes that are usually marked by descending steps, 
the treads of which are sandstone and the risers 
shale. The steps and ledges, indicating successive 
beds, look rather thin when seen from the Rim, but 
in reality they may be from ten to fifty feet thick. 
Rains with their consequent streams wash down 
and over them, creating valleys in the slopes, little 
canyons in the rock. The slopes are usually marked 
by a good many small pinyons, scrub-oaks, berry 
bushes, with grasses and flowers. Where the growth 
is scanty and the rock formation shows through, the 
repeated lines of the steps remind one of a Roman 
circus. The arena effect is present everywhere. 

The Kaibab, the Coconino, the Supai, and the 
Red Wall all complement each other in their carv- 
ings, but with great variety in their appearances. 
The harder walls show the large arenas and the 
softer ones the small flutings. Both of them are 



62 THE GRAND CANYON 

superb in line. The Supai beds are more regular 
and graceful than the others, and individual layers 
can often be traced for miles in their wonderful 
serpentine windings. They were originally laid 
down in a shallow sea, and the red mud and sand of 
their composition were mainly washings from the 
neighboring shores. 

This same red mud loosened by rains is to-day 
washing down from the Supai slopes upon the face 
of the Red Wall and staining that enormous under- 
lying stratum a bright salmon-red. Its local color, 
as already suggested, is a blue-gray; but this color 
shows only in recently fractured parts or where the 
Supai has disappeared from the top and the local 
hue is allowed to reassert itself. Like the other wall 
colors, that of the Red Wall varies with the light 
and takes on many manifestations. In form the 
wall is a huge base upholding the strata above it, 
is largely a limestone with some alternating beds 
of sandstone, and is very compact, showing no hori- 
zontal lines of parting or bedding. There is a small 
talus at the bottom of it, but this is not a slope 
breaking down from water-wear so much as a rock 
heap accumulated by fallen fragments from the 
face-wall. The cliffs are almost perpendicular, and 
from the upper edge a stone will drop clear and sheer 
to the bottom. The Red Wall is between five and 
six hundred feet thick and is considered one of 



^ THE CANYON WALLS 63 

the sturdiest strata in the Canyon. Receiving the 
accumulated waters from the upper slopes it wears 
back in enormous cirques or arenas — great amphi- 
theatres that might seat half a million people. 
The miner and the explorer still worry along its 
upper edge seeking some break in the face that will 
let them down to the River, but the Red Wall keeps 
its inaccessible front. The only break in the edge 
is where streams run over it and cut a pitcher lip, 
and the only fracture is where a geological fault is 
apparent. The trails to the River lead up or down 
it where it is faulted, as at Bright Angel and 
Hermit; but not otherwise. It is one continuous 
precipice, the most abrupt wall in the Canyon, with 
no weak line about it. When seen from below, the 
bulk of it is vastly impressive. It seems to be the 
underbasing of the globe rather than a simple sedi- 
mentary bed laid down under the sea and dotted 
with occasional cup-corals here and there. 

For all its hardness and stanchness there are 
some hollows in the Red Wall, made by wind and 
rain, that take on the proportions of caves. Some- 
times the cut-back arenas in the face have project- 
ing eaves or roofs over them — the wear being more 
rapid beneath than above — and this produces an 
open-cave effect. Again, one finds in places huge 
sections fallen out in blocks leaving square cells or 
spaces under the wall. But these appearances are 



64 THE GRAND CANYON 

unusual. The Red Wall, generally speaking, sym- 
bolizes endurance and strength. 

When the bottom of the Red Wall is reached we 
meet with trouble. The trouble is geologically 
called "unconformity." There are strata missing 
here — strata that are due to appear and yet are 
not seen. The Carboniferous ends under the Red 
Wall, and the Devonian, Silurian, and Ordovician 
should succeed, but the last two are entirely missing 
and the Devonian appears only in isolated fragments 
here and there. 

What became of these strata? Perhaps they 
never existed — ^never were laid down here. The 
sea-bed may have risen when only the Cambrian 
series that now underlie the Red Wall were formed. 
That series may have been the top strata for many 
centuries, and then the whole plateau may have 
subsided beneath the sea and been covered by the 
strata of the Carboniferous. Who can now say? 

But it is more probable that the land arose from 
the sea when the Devonian, Silurian, and Ordovician 
were in place and that these strata were eroded, 
washed away, before the subsidence in the sea that 
allowed the Carboniferous and later strata to be 
superimposed. There are theories on the subject — 
several of them — ^held by geologists and they are 
more or less tenable. Millions of years are stipu- 
lated for their working out. But neither the 



THE CANYON WALLS 65 

theories nor the ages are vitally important to us at 
this time. The main necessity is to recognize that 
three geological periods with several thousand feet 
of rock strata are gone between the Red Wall and 
the Muav limestone — gone without changing the 
dip or greatly ruffling the surface of the underlying 
limestones on which the Red Wall now rests. Their 
disappearance we may count a Canyon mystery and 
let it pass at that. 

The strata that now follow under the Red Wall 
belong to the Cambrian Period and are usually re- 
ferred to as the Tonto Group (Plate 12). The first 
of the group is the Muav limestone. It underlies 
the base of the Red Wall and does not show to ad- 
vantage because the talus of the Red Wall rather 
hides it. On Bright Angel Trail it is inconspicuous, 
though there is as much as three hundred and fifty 
feet of it. It is thinly bedded, finely mottled, bluish 
in local color, but stained to a warm tan, or in places 
pale green, by exposure. Few fossils have been 
found in it, whereas the beds lying under it are 
marked with them. Geologists are interested in 
the Muav limestone, but its strata will hardly at- 
tract the attention of the average visitor. 

Below this Muav limestone are the so-called 
Bright Angel shales which spread enormously be- 
cause they are soft, break down easily into slopes 
that flatten out and merge into a platform or ter- 



66 THE GKAND CANYON 

race sometimes miscalled "the lower plateau/' The 
thickness of the shales is not more than three hun- 
dred and fifty feet, but their slopes spread down and 
out in places for great distances. 

These Bright Angel shales are easily recognized 
anywhere and everywhere by their graceful rounded 
contours, their smooth water-worn slopes, their shal- 
low arroyos and stream-beds, and, above all, by 
their Nile-green or yellow-green coloring. The color 
is refined and delicate and responds quickly to every 
change in sky and cloud. Some of the most beauti- 
ful color-harmonies at the Canyon come from the 
juxtaposition of these greenish shales with the sal- 
mon hues of the Red Wall above and the heliotrope 
and raspberry reds of the Unkar Group below. 

The flattened slopes of these shales reach out and 
down toward the rim of the Inner Canyon, overly- 
ing in thin sheets or shingles the strata known as 
the Tapeats sandstone (Plate 30). A false sage- 
brush with sad-colored cacti grow upon them, wild 
burros use them for a stamping-ground, and coyotes, 
lizards, and snakes love their isolation. There are 
trails across them leading east and west in the Can- 
yon depths, and from them wonderful sights are to 
be seen. Not the least of the sights is the overlook 
into the Inner Canyon with the Colorado running 
like a mad mill-race twelve hundred feet below. 

The Bright Angel shales are followed by two hun- 



THE CANYON WALLS 67 

dred feet of the Tapeats sandstone, coarse-grained, 
cross-bedded, and very stubborn in texture. Its 
side-canyons have abrupt walls that are as impossible 
of ascent or descent as the Red Wall. The layers 
of it seem thin and brittle, snapped off on the faces 
in sharp fractures, with shallow ledges that only the 
owls and the eagles seem to know intimately (Plates 
5, 6). These beds of Tapeats sandstone are occa- 
sionally broken through on their backs in cubes or 
sections like a shattered pavement. The breaks 
develop with rains into sunken basins of enormous 
size with ragged-edged, inaccessible walls. At the 
base of buttes both the green shales and the Ta- 
peats sandstones are frequently broken through and 
cut out by great water-wear, but the far points of 
the base or platform remain unbroken and extend 
out as star-shaped arms that appear like pedimental 
supports of the buttes themselves. 

The thin slab-like layers of the Tapeats do not 
make a wall that is commanding in mass, though it 
bristles with difficulties for the climber. Nor is its 
color (a brown or buif; in places a dull maroon) 
very alluring. It is more curious than attractive be- 
cause of its age, its pebbly grit, and its wave mark- 
ings formed under the sea. At its base, as also 
along its top, are many recesses or caves, some of 
them due to structure, some to stream-wear, and 
some to the seeping and falling of water through 



68 THE GRAND CANYON 

the rocks from above. Again, there are many 
crevices along its rim that seem to be bottomless. 
A stone thrown down them will rattle its way out 
of sight and hearing without coming to a halt. 
The Tapeats forms the cap to the rim of the Inner 
Canyon. It extends out to the edge and breaks off 
abruptly in a brown cliff over the old Archaean wall 
(Plate 5). So perpendicular is its face-wall that, 
once more, a stone can be tossed from the top into 
the stream below without difficulty. 

Between the Tapeats and the old Archaean comes 
another gap in the geological record called "the 
great unconformity." Some twelve thousand feet 
of the Algonkian system are here missing, but por- 
tions of it — the so-called Unkar and Chuar groups 
— still remain in sections and wedges (Plate 11). 
Why and how they have survived is matter of 
theory in which geologists practically agree. The 
beds were originally laid down on the smooth, 
planed-off surface of what is called the old Archaean 
rock. This old rock is not exactly the original crust 
of the earth but a rock changed by heat, pressure, 
and intrusions from below. This metamorphosed 
rock and the beds lying upon it were bent into 
arches and hollows by deep-seated earth forces, 
and in places were broken into blocks. Some of the 
blocks were moved up and some sank down, the 
sedimentary beds in the down-dropped blocks being 



THE CANYON WALLS 69 

thus inlaid into the original floor. When erosion 
came, the greater part of the Algonkian system, in- 
eluding huge portions of the Unkar and Chuar, 
were worn off and carried away, but certain other 
portions, being perhaps protected by their inlaid 
position or being of harder fibre, remained intact. 
Afterward there was a subsidence under the sea of 
the whole area, and for many centuries the laying 
down of the Tapeats sandstone, with succeeding 
formations, took place on the eroded surface of the 
Archaean and around and over the remaining blocks 
and portions of the Unkar and Chuar groups. 
When, after the second upheaval, the Canyon was 
carved out, the surviving portions of the Unkar 
and Chuar appeared as detached sections surrounded 
by the Tapeats, or lying irregularly between the 
Tapeats and the schists of the old Archaean. 

These Unkar and Chuar groups are known to-day 
as the Grand Canyon Series, and sections of them 
appear in half a dozen places in the Canyon. A por- 
tion of the Unkar shows across the River to the left 
of Bright Angel Canyon. The best view of it is 
from the Turtlehead on the Tonto platform, but it 
can be seen from the hotel Rim without a glass. 
Its distinctive mark is its raspberry-red color, tem- 
pered with a what-not of mauve, heliotrope, and 
violet. At the Turtlehead you are on a level with 
it looking across the River, and can see its irregular 



70 THE GRAND CANYON 

disposition, as well as its later surrounding and 
partial overlaying by the Tapeats sandstone. The 
section begins to show at the left, far down the 
River, under the foot of Isis Temple, and continues 
under the cliff wall of Cheops Pyramid. Straight 
across the River from you the light-colored shelf 
of the Tapeats breaks off and is succeeded on a lower 
shelf by the Unkar, which persists as far as Bright 
Angel Canyon. A little mound of the Unkar — a 
remnant left over — appears on your side of the 
River to the right and above the last lap of the 
Bright Angel Trail; and above this mound there is a 
shelf of the same stratum almost on a level with the 
Tapeats. 

The Unkar is, all told, the most precious piece of 
local color at the Canyon, and with the curious 
forms of the beds, slopes, and pits goes to make 
up a very unusual appearance. At Bright Angel 
the mauves, magentas, and vermilions of the slopes, 
the purples of the wave-shaped layers that come 
out to the edge, the old velvet quality of them all 
is very striking. At sunset these colors change 
to wonderful tones, especially if there are clouds 
above them that catch light and color from the 
west. With rains the colors change once more to 
brighter notes, and some of their splendor runs over 
the edge and down the face of the old Archaean rock, 
staining that an indescribable but unforgetable hue. 



THE CANYON WALLS 71 

The largest outcrop of these Unkar beds is to the 
east of Grand View, where they extend as far as the 
mouth of the Little Colorado. There, too, the 
Chuar beds come into view with a more diversified 
coloring than the Unkar. But they are not acces- 
sible to the average Canyon visitor because the 
way there is a difficult one to travel. 

The rocks composing these two groups are made 
up of limestones, sandstones, shales, quartzites, 
conglomerates, and were originally laid down as 
shallow-water deposits, the Unkar first and the 
Chuar later. They were greatly eroded, as we have 
already premised, after upheaval. Only the hard 
cores and the deposits protected by inlaid positions 
remained. These portions show no fossil life. 
Their continuance surrounded by the Tapeats 
sandstones or lying at odd angles on the Archaean 
(or, as they are called, Vishnu) schists creates one 
of the most interesting of all the geological appear- 
ances at the Canyon. 

With the crystalline schists that underlie the 
Unkar and Chuar beds we come to a swift transition. 
All the rocks of the Algonkian and Palaeozoic sys- 
tems — that is, all the rocks in the Canyon walls 
above the Archaean — are of sedimentary origin. 
They were deposited in flat beds under the sea and 
heaved up — for the most part with little break or 
fracture — to their present horizontal positions. The 



72 THE GRAND CANYON 



Archaean schists, gneisses, and granites that make 
up the inner walls (or Granite Gorge) of the Can- 
yon are of very different structure (Plate 5). They 
do not lie in horizontal beds but are on end, gnarled, 
crumpled by pressure, fused by heat. The schists 
are metamorphic rocks entirely recrystallized by 
heat; the gneisses and granites are igneous or fire 
rocks. The fire-rocks lying beneath pushed up 
through and helped metamorphose or change the 
rocks above into schists, at the same time being 
themselves recrystallized and twisted into fan- 
tastic shapes that set as they cooled. The result is 
some twelve hundred feet of rock that in interest 
for the layman outstrips any in the Canyon. 

The Archsean flanks both sides of the Colorado 
at Bright Angel — the River flowing through and 
over it. The sides are almost perpendicular, are 
rough in surface, and are accessible to the climber 
only in spots. The rock is very hard — the hardest 
in the Canyon — is cast into slag forms by heat and 
pressure, and is not only worn and cut by water, 
but is broken by heavy boulders. The rim or 
edge is fluted like the Kaibab by streams that pour 
over it from the Tonto platforms, but the indenta- 
tions are irregular, shallow, and not pronounced 
in curvature (Plate 23). 

One cannot imagine anything more uncanny than 
these inner Canyon walls (Plate 19). They are ap- 



THE CANYON WALLS 73 

propriate lining for the interior of the Pit, and in 
places where they break down in conjunction with 
Unkar beds into huge pot-holes (notably near the 
foot of the Lincoln Point Trail) they are almost too 
creepy for enjoyment. They are grim and un- 
earthly, a mixture of everything that can be made by 
heat, fusion, intrusion — the flux of the great fur- 
naces down below. No one knows how deep they 
lie. There are pale indications of old stratification 
about them, as though at one time they may have 
been bedded, but they have been so bent and blurred 
by heat that recognition is difficult. Perhaps they 
once lay on a great flat plain and the plain stretched 
out into infinite distance with a crystalline surface 
upon which was neither water, air, nor life. The 
newly formed world may have cooled down to such 
a surface. But that was before either the Colorado 
or the Canyon. Down here in the Granite Gorge 
you are not merely prehistoric and pregeologic; 
you may be looking at walls that date back to the 
cooling of the crust. 

No doubt much of their strange appearance is due 
to their color. This is a dark purple varied by every 
imaginable shade of violet, warmed by reds that 
suggest dark rubies and garnets, streaked by broad 
intrusive bands of rose granite that wind in ser- 
pentines along the walls, and glittering with count- 
less flakes and faces of mica. Seen at noonday 



74 THE GRAND CANYON 

under full sunlight it makes a most astounding 
spread of dark-reddish purple. The eye wanders 
over it bewildered by the great blend, the splendid 
glow of it, and yet fully conscious that infinite 
variety of color, rather than sameness, makes up its 
harmony. To add to the bewilderment the mica 
glintings give the wall in places a satiny sheen. 
And the bent and twisted strata keep beating into 
your eye and brain the story of fire — the fire that 
perhaps once glowed in the Great Pit in the heart 
of the earth. It is a true enough Plutonian bed 
through which the red Colorado runs. 



CHAPTER VII 
BUTTES AND PROMONTORIES 

There are probably few, even among the doubt- 
ers, who regard the buttes in the Canyon as of vol- 
canic origin. Some of the tepee-shaped ones look 
not unlike volcanic cones, but there is no igneous 
rock or ashes in their make-up. They are all of 
them laid down in uniform strata and are composed 
of sedimentary beds — the same beds that are seen 
everywhere in the exposed Canyon walls. From 
which it may be inferred, perhaps without error, 
that the buttes were once part of the walls. 

How did they become separated? 

By one of the processes of erosion so very appar- 
ent that it seems like explaining the obvious to point 
it out. It has been suggested that after the Great 
Denudation the Plateau was canyoned by the 
River, that the canyon walls thus created were cut 
into transversely by such streams as Bright Angel 
and Hermit Creeks, that the streams cut back into 
the walls, that the walls became fluted into recesses 
called arenas and projected out into points called 
promontories. Well, the butte is the end of the 
promontory cut off and isolated. 

75 



76 THE GRA.ND CANYON 

What cut it off? 

Why, water from gathered rains, which, finding 
a depression in the promontory back from the 
point, began cutting a transverse stream-bed down 
each side of the ridge. The process of sawing off 
the point of a promontory with water and sand is, 
of course, a matter of many centuries, but Nature 
is never hurried in her processes. Time is not the 
essence of any of her doings. As yet she has sawn 
through none of the projecting points down to the 
old Archaean rock. The deepest of the cuts reach 
no farther than the foot of the Red Wall, with the 
Tonto shales for ^ base platform. Eventually the 
base-line will be down in the fire-rocks, and then 
perhaps the top of the buttes will have been washed 
away; but at present many of them still lift their 
heads up to the Canyon Rim. 

You may see the sawing and separating process 
going on almost anywhere in the Canyon. The 
Battleship promontory, for example, lying to the 
left of the Bright Angel Trail, has its high points 
in upper decks and a turret, and between these and 
El Tovar Point, of which the Battleship is an ex- 
tension, you will notice a depression or saddle of 
some hundred feet or more (Plate 1). In periods 
of rain a stream pours down from that depression 
into Bright Angel Creek on the east (you can see 
its dry bed and fall over the Red Wall plainly 



BUTTES AND PROMONTORIES 77 

enough from the hotel) and another stream pours 
down into Horn Creek on the west. The streams 
are cutting away the Battleship from its mainland 
and making of it a butte. It will take many years 
to complete the severance. While the cut has been 
deepening, the top has not been allowed to go scot- 
free. Erosion has taken off the Kaibab and Coco- 
nino strata. The red rocks of the turret belong to 
the Supai formation. And they, too, are crumbling 
— are in process of disintegration. 

Just over the Battleship is the point of a promon- 
tory called Dana Butte. It is already called a butte 
before separation from its parent body. Water is 
at work at the depression behind it, though it is 
now merely a narrow ledge. Farther down the Can- 
yon there is, on the south side, a point that is cut 
away from the Plateau so much that no one living 
has ever been able to cross over to it. It is known 
as No Man's Land, though on the map I believe it 
is put down as Drummond Plateau. Guides and 
explorers look at it longingly, thinking that perhaps 
there are Indian relics to be found on the flat top. 
But there is no reason to tfeink it different from any 
other isolated portion of the Plateau. It is simply 
a butte in the making that has been cut off by a 
rear gorge from any human inquiry. 

None of these illustrations set forth the complete 
butte — the mountain in the round. There is only 



78 THE GRAND CANYON 

one good example of it south of the River, and that 
is Mt. Huethawali. It stands on a rocky platform 
opposite Bass Camp and centuries ago was isolated 
by streams that cut it out on all sides at about the 
same time. It is a mountain in little, being six 
thousand two hundred and eighty feet above sea- 
level and about eight hundred feet above its im- 
mediate platform. Crumbling masses of the Coco- 
nino still form its top and the Supai makes up its 
body and base. It is an excellent example of butte 
making by stream-wear. Dry canyons and arroyos 
are now on every side of it, and they indicate that 
the erosion must have been enormous. 

How does it happen that Mt. Huethawali is prac- 
tically the only butte in the round on the south 
side of the Canyon ? The "towers" and "temples" 
and "castles" are, for the most part, on the north 
side of the Canyon — across the River. What 
brought that about? If you look at a map of the 
Canyon you may notice that the stream-beds on 
the north side cut back into the Rim three times as 
far as those on the south side, that the extending 
promontories are three times as long, the buttes 
ten times as many. From the River to the Rim 
on the north is ten or more miles; from the River 
to the Rim on the south is only three or four miles. 
What is the meaning of that ? 

It has already been stated that there was a great 



BUTTES AND PROMONTORIES 79 

descent from the high Utah plateaus down to the 
Canyon — a downward step over cliffs and platforms 
in the guise of a geological stairway. The down- 
ward slip continues across the Canyon. The North 
Rim is higher by a thousand or more feet than the 
South Rim. A thousand feet of descent in fifteen 
miles is a swift pitch for running water. Whether 
normally draining the Kaibab Plateau with small 
creeks or cutting it fiercely with rain-swollen streams, 
the wear is very great. No wonder that these 
streams cut back into the north plateau, that long 
points or promontories extend out southward into 
the Canyon, and that transverse drainage streams 
cut out many buttes and "temples." 

Not only is the descent and the consequent water- 
wear greater at the North than at the South Rim, 
but there is more water in volume. It must not be 
forgotten that the rise from the Canyon to the 
Utah plateaus is something over four thousand 
feet. There is more rainfall on the Markagunt 
than on the Coconino Plateau, for no other reason 
than that it is more elevated. When there is a 
storm in the Canyon it clears up along the South 
Rim before it does along the North Rim, and if 
there are clouds in the Canyon they lift and drift 
and skulk along the northern edge last of all, be- 
cause of the higher altitude and colder air over there. 
The greater rainfall on the higher plateaus drains 



80 THE GRA.ND CANYON 

down the geological stairway with swiftness, and 
more or less of it finally comes down through the 
gulches of the North Rim or seeps out through the 
strata as springs. 

Now, as you stand on the South Rim, near the 
hotel, you will notice that you are on a slight eleva- 
tion. The land slips away from you down to the 
railway-tracks and back through the Tusayan (or 
Coconino) Forest to Williams and beyond. Your 
trip up from the main line of the Santa Fe was an 
up-grade trip. A railway-train can travel up-hill 
but a stream of water cannot. Hence, you find 
very few streams emptying into the Canyon from 
the south. Those that do, such as the Little Colo- 
rado, have canyons so deeply sunk that they over- 
come the surface grade. The drainage into the 
Canyon from the south extends back only a short 
distance. More often the waters run away to the 
south, sink to underground rock fissures, and then 
creep back to the Canyon, coming out below the 
Supai shales or the Red Wall as springs. The 
southern drainage is neither large in quantity nor 
swift in descent as compared with that at the north. 
Hence, the south-side canyons are not so much cut 
back, nor the promontories extended so far toward 
the River, nor the buttes so pronounced in their 
isolation, as at the north. The buttes are, to be 
sure, huge enough to make one stare, but on the 
other side they are stupendous. 



BUTTES AND PROMONTORIES 81 

Shiva is as high as the Rim and, according to 
Button, has a mountain mass as great as Mt. 
Washington. All of the Carboniferous strata show 
on its wall, and, though we cannot see its base, we 
know that it is down on that old Archaean rock of 
the Inner Gorge. A mile in height and a mile 
in diameter across the top ! Brahma, Deva, Zo- 
roaster (Plate 14), Manu temples are about the 
same height, if somewhat less in bulk. How was 
any one persuaded to think of these enormous 
masses in terms of formal architecture! There 
never was a temple of Shiva or Brahma that lifted 
five hundred feet or could hold five thousand peo- 
ple, but here you have the carved forms of Nature 
that reach up nearly seven thousand feet, and, if 
hollow, might hold a million souls! In all their 
many centuries of existence they have never heard 
the footfall or the voice of priest or worshipper, 
or had any association with humanity. How easily, 
securely, undeviatingly from the perpendicular 
they have stood through the ages, while the Indian 
temples have been falling away stone by stone, 
crumbling under their own weight, flattening into 
their own dust ! 

The pyramid of Cheops at Gizeh was the labor 
of thousands of slaves over many years. When 
the capstone was put on the top, the height reached 
was four hundred and eighty-two feet. But here 
at the Canyon the so-called Cheops Pyramid was 



82 THE GRAND CANYON 

the labor of Nature over thousands of centuries, and 
to-day, after ages of erosion, it still lifts skyward over 
five thousand feet. Perhaps the first marauder 
who broke into the tomb in the heart of the Gizeh 
Pyramid was brought to a standstill by seeing in 
the dust of the floor a naked footprint — the foot- 
print of the last attendant who had gone out and 
sealed the door behind him five thousand years 
before; but here in the under-strata of the Can- 
yon Pyramid are the sand-ripples left by the waves 
of a primal sea perhaps five million years ago. 
You can almost see to a nicety just where the last 
wave broke. These are the footprints of Creation, 
beside which those of the human seem so small and 
so inconsequential. Why was association with the 
work of man ever invoked here at the Canyon? 
Nothing that he ever did looks other than foolish 
compared with the master-work of Nature. 

But Nature takes down her own structures as 
remorselessly as she puts them up. She is taking 
down the buttes, grinding them to sand, carrying 
them away. All of them are subject to the same 
wear as the walls, and water cuts them as readily 
as the Rim. The rounded butte is guttered, gullied, 
and ravined on the sides, cut back in shallow can- 
yons that have protruding points and promontories. 
Here once more is the fluting process carried on 
by streams that run during heavy showers. It is 



BUTTES AND PROMONTOEIES 83 

the same process at work everywhere. Perhaps 
you can see it better at the base than elsewhere, for 
here the notches or flutings are often repeated in 
the pavement of Tonto shales, as has already been 
stated. The pattern of the base seems star-shaped, 
and between the promontory arms of the star are 
the washes or arroyos broken through the Tonto 
platform. Above these arroyos the amphitheatres 
or crescents of the Red Wall appear everywhere 
(Plate 8). 

As you look out from the South Rim at the buttes 
across the River you perhaps notice that between 
any two of them there is a little canyon — a creek- 
bed with abrupt sides that looks small until you see 
it through a glass or cross over to it. These creek- 
beds extend back and often reach behind the buttes. 
They furnish the runway for the streams that cut 
the buttes from the main Rim and isolate them in 
the Canyon. They also furnish ground sands, 
gravel, and broken rock wherewith the cutting is 
done. It is all erosion — cutting out and washing 
down. Everything is carried back to the great sea. 
New beds are to-day being laid down in the Gulf of 
California that some time may be heaved up into 
canyon walls or a continent as yet undreamed of in 
our geography. 

Many of the buttes are flat-topped and have 
growths of juniper and pinyon similar, if less robust, 



84 THE GRAND CANYON 

to those at the Rim. The side-walls have been re- 
cently exposed, and consequently are steep in de- 
scent. The Red Wall especially, for all its scoops 
and cirques, stands upright and is as defiant of 
climbers as of weather. The explorer creeps around 
the base with difficulty, worrying along arroyos and 
platforms; but he does not go over the top. So it 
is that the majority of the great buttes have never 
been scaled. They are still unknown enchanted 
mesas with a silence and a mystery all their 
own. 

Notwithstanding their flat tops, all the buttes cut 
out in the round have a tendency to wear away at 
the apex and become tepee-shaped. That is not 
only brought about by the slashing of rains and winds 
around the top, but by the washing down of stones 
and gravels which accumulate at the bottom. The 
accumulation takes the form of a talus or slope 
which spreads out at the foot and gives the appear- 
ance of a wide base that upholds the butte. It is 
merely an appearance, for the walls descend per- 
pendicularly and are not re-enforced by the talus, 
but the illusion of the butte being based in broad 
and mighty platforms is nevertheless helped on. 
Button speaks rather ponderously of the effective- 
ness of these " segments of hyperbolas of long curva- 
ture that concave upward." They lend stability 
to the upper structure. 



BUTTES AND PROMONTORIES 85 

And also grace. Grace is something frequently 
found in the heaped stones and gravels of the taluses. 
The rounded lines of these and the flowing lines of 
the Tonto slopes are mighty contrasts to the up- 
right faces of the Red Wall, the descending steps of 
the Supai shales, or the ragged cliffs of the Co- 
conino sandstone. The contrast seems to magnify 
the quality of each — ^that is, the slopes and taluses 
become more sweeping and rolling, the walls more 
elevated and positive in lift and force. As a result 
the buttes loom and bulk colossal (Plate 13). What 
enormous strength is symbolized in the outlines! 
What a feeling of mass and weight in the flat face of 
the walls ! There is no better illustration of the 
sublime in landscape. Mont Blanc, Niagara, the 
Pacific have always been put forth as examples of 
sublimity, presumably because of their mass and 
spread; but why not Shiva here in the Canyon that 
to mass adds lines of grace and force, with color 
that is both exalting and compelling? 

The buttes have the same coloring as the walls of 
the Canyon, only there is more of it — color on all 
sides instead of merely on a face-wall. And being 
in the round they catch more sunlight, throw off 
hues in more varied tones. But they have their 
times for splendor and are not uniformly brilliant 
from dawn to dusk. In fact, at noontime, with the 
sun overhead, they bleach out and their local hues 



86 THE GEAND CANYON 

are lost in blue-grays. Noon is the worst possible 
hour at the Canyon, so far as color is concerned. 
Only at dawn or after sunset do the walls and buttes 
warm up and glow with hues both local and reflected. 
It is one of the astonishing features here that rough- 
faced rocks can reflect such brilliant cloud and sky 
effects and that the local yellow or rose or red can 
shift into orange or carmine or violet so quickly and 
without effort. 

Not only the color undergoes change from dawn to 
dusk but the forms shift, appearing and seemingly 
disappearing with varying lights. Button mentions 
this in his monograph; and the early Spaniards — ■ 
the first white people to see the Canyon — spoke of 
buttes that faded away at noon and came back at 
night. No doubt the Spaniards attributed the ap- 
pearance to things supernatural, but it was then, as 
now, merely an illusion brought about by light. The 
planes of landscape are greatly flattened and often 
disappear under direct overhead light. Perspective 
is wrecked, distance is telescoped, lines are blurred, 
surfaces are deadened into mere tints, objects at 
a distance are confused with objects near at hand, 
and often a blue haze of atmosphere perhaps blots 
them out entirely. 

These strange effects are not strange as soon as 
you discover the reason for them. They are almost 
always noticed from the high point of the Rim. 



BUTTES AND PROMONTORIES 87 

Now at the Rim you are looking down into a tre- 
mendous trough in the ground. It is like seeing a 
valley from a mountain top or the earth from an 
aeroplane. The first things missed are the shadows. 
You cannot see them, for they are imderneath. You 
are looking into reflecting high lights. Usually in 
landscape we look not down but straight ahead, 
and objects are distinguished by their shadows in 
contrast with their lights. In other words, we rec- 
ognize them by their drawing. But looking down 
into the Canyon the drawing is largely lost because 
of the absence of shadow and the presence of color 
in closely related tones. What wonder that per- 
spective should often go out in a blur of blue ! 

And you will notice further that you are not look- 
ing at buttes or walls in silhouette against the sky, 
as you might see Mt. Shasta, for instance, but at 
buttes seen against buttes and walls against walls. 
Such relief as there is shows as color against color or 
texture against texture, and not as dark against 
light. That is more cause for the blurring of per- 
spective and the telescoping of planes. As for out- 
lines, the sharp edge of Shiva shown against a back- 
ground of gray wall may go for nothing as definition. 
So that while this absence of shadow and blending 
of hue may make for tonal harmony, it also makes 
for lack of definition, for flattening of planes and 
perspective, for dissipation of relief and drawing — 



88 THE GRAND CANYON 

in short, for the apparent disappearance of edges, 
walls, and buttes. 

Naturally, such disappearances occur when the 
sun is directly overhead and shadows are least in 
evidence. Then it is that many small buttes and 
promontories are overlooked, that amphitheatres 
in the Tonto platforms are not seen, that washes and 
arroyos and side-canyons are as though they had 
never been. Then, too, the reds and oranges and 
purples of the Canyon depths get dull and mouldy- 
looking, the air becomes a metallic blue-silver, the 
light diffuses and spreads rather than concentrates. 
It is a disappointing time because one's vision is 
confused. The Canyon appears merely as a tone 
effect in bleached hues. 

But just as soon as the sun begins to slope to the 
west a change takes place. The shadows begin to 
lengthen behind each wall and butte and pinnacle. 
Straightway the huge forms come forth in their 
massiveness, lift up, spread out. Drawing comes 
back and with it perspective. The air changes to 
lilac or purple, the light falls in concentrated shafts, 
warming the colors on the slopes of the Supai, 
bringing out the raspberry red of the Unkar Group, 
and turning the chocolate of the Granite Gorge into 
a lively purple. The lower the sun sinks and the 
sharper the sun-shaft, the farther back fall the re- 
sultant shadows, the stronger the relief of scarp 



BUTTES AND PROMONTORIES 89 

and dome and arena, the higher the leap of every 
tint and hue in the Canyon. Gray becomes golden, 
red turns into carmine, blue becomes gas blue, and 
lilac becomes bright violet. The final blare of 
color is likely to come after the sun has perhaps 
dropped below the verge and the upper sky is all 
aflame. Then the Canyon catches up the overhead 
reflections and spreads them atop of its own local 
color to make a color gamut the like of which is 
seldom seen on land or sea. 

The tale is repeated at dawn. The walls warm 
from fawn-color to orange, grow pink, grow red, grow 
gray. Shadows lengthen and define, then contract 
and grow vague. Buttes disengage and stand out, 
then dissipate and practically disappear. Never 
while the sun travels across the arc of the blue is 
there any standstill to the panorama. It is al- 
ways shifting and changing, but its most brilliant 
display is at dawn and dusk when the sun-shafts are 
the flattest and the shadows are the longest. 



CHAPTER VIII 
BRIGHT ANGEL AND HERMIT TRAILS 

The tourist in the valley is always plagued with 
a desire to climb the mountain that lifts before 
him, and here at the Canyon, where he is virtu- 
ally on the mountain's top, he is tormented with a 
wish to go down to the River five thousand feet 
below. Whatever our point of view, it never seems 
quite right. That which we have is as nothing 
compared with that which we have not. 

It is somehow thought that one cannot see the 
Canyon without a trip down to the River that caused 
it. And then there are those who wish not so much 
to see the Canyon as to "do" it, and "doing" it 
means descending Bright Angel Trail on a barrel- 
bellied mule, accompanied by a guide in "chaps" 
and cowboy hat. No trip here is quite complete 
that does not include a dusty day on the trail with 
a river-party. And for those who cannot, or will 
not, see the Canyon in any other way, it perhaps has 
its advantages. 

For the depth is worth seeing, afoot if you can, 
astride if you must. Bright Angel is a good foot- 
path, and any normally healthy person can go 
down and up it in a day and be not the worse for 

90 



BRIGHT ANGEL AND HERMIT TRAILS 91 

wear. It is safe enough, either by foot or by mule, 
notwithstanding the "dizzy precipices'' and "beet- 
ling heights," in the perfervid language of those 
who have just returned from the trip. There are no 
precipices or abysses on the Bright Angel (Plate 2). 
You meet with slopes and descents where you might 
be injured by a fall, but then you might break an 
arm or a leg down the hotel steps. There is nothing 
dangerous about the principal trails to the River, 
though some of the lesser known, such as the 
Boucher, creep around abrupt descents. Those 
who are anxious to go down a difficult trail should 
travel forty miles west to Havasu Canyon and 
descend to the Indian village three thousand feet 
below. There are four trails down Havasu, but the 
Wallapai on the west side will probably satisfy the 
most daring. In spots it is almost aerial. 

Some distinct advantages follow the going down 
Bright Angel afoot. You are not hurried or wor- 
ried by your fellow travellers and can take your 
time. And you can dispense with the brave guide, 
who is usually more or less of a superfluity. You 
could no more lose the trail than the Rim or the 
River; and there are no bewildering forests, no wild 
beasts to rend you. You will not be attacked by a 
side-winder, or a Gila monster, and not even a 
hydrophobic skunk is likely to cross your path. 
Bright Angel is too well travelled for trouble. 



92 THE GRAND CANYON 

It is perhaps the oldest trail at the Canyon. The 
bighorn and the Indian followed it many years 
before the coming of the white man, trappers and 
explorers used it before Powell, and when copper was 
discovered in the Canyon a mining company took it 
over and made it navigable for burros freighted with 
packs of copper. It was copper that built most of 
the railway up from Williams in connection with the 
trail, and when the mine failed it was the Santa Fe 
that took over the railway, completed it, built El 
Tovar at the end of the line, and opened the Canyon 
to tourists — even down to the River and beyond. 

The trail starts in at the left of Bright Angel 
Camp. The descent is quite rapid by the zigzags, 
and in a few minutes one is a hundred feet or more 
below the Rim (Plate 15). Boulders are hanging 
on the slopes, and the steep wall of the Kaibab is 
almost within touch. This latter is a hard limestone, 
and on the weatherings of it, or on fallen boulders, 
you will notice small fan-shaped sea-shells embedded 
in the rock.> They are curious but perhaps less 
interesting than the gray, mustard-yellow, and 
orange lichens growing on the surfaces, or the sage- 
green mosses, bunch-grasses, and wild flowers that 
root in the cracks and flourish so unconsciously and 
so beautifully. They are usually frail-looking flow- 
ers — ^trilliums, wild geraniums, sweet peas, asters, 
lupines, pentstemons — with a gaunt look and a 




From a photograph, copyrighted by Fred Harvey. 

Plate 15. BRIGHT ANGEL TRAIL, UPPER PART. 
El Tovar Hotel on the Rim and Bright Angel cottages. 



BRIGHT ANGEL AND HERMIT TRAILS 93 

bleached coloring peculiar to desert vegetation; 
but they bloom and bear and sway in the wind as 
though they had a mission to fulfil and were happy 
in fulfilling it. 

The vegetation decreases from the Rim to the 
River, but just under the Rim, where there is the 
wash of rains in wet weather, the growths are many. 
Some isolated specimens of the Douglas spruce are 
here. They grow below but not above the Rim 
and seem to flourish in the cool of the shadow. 
The taluses and slopes of the Kaibab harbor them 
almost everywhere along the South Rim. Some 
pinyons, nut-pines {yinus edulis), cedars also appear 
in Bright Angel, growing along the ledges, humming 
slightly in strong winds, bearing and dropping their 
cones and berries into the Canyon hundreds of feet 
below. The crested jays nest in these trees, as the 
cliff-swallows in the wall crevices of the Kaibab, 
but whether they drop their young hundreds of 
feet over the ledges I am not able to say. Appar- 
ently, both trees and birds are out of place, but they 
fight on, live on, and bring forth after their kind 
here as elsewhere. 

More directly in the taluses and among the fallen 
debris of the walls are the wafer and flowering ash, 
the bush-oaks, the syringas, hollies, hackberries, 
with wild currant and gooseberry — bushes and 
tangles that increase wherever there is a little soil 



94 THE GKAND CANYON 

and underground water to encourage them. The 
flowers, from the Canadian thistle to the smallest 
star-shaped species that lie low amidst the awns of 
the moss, grow wherever there is a bench of soil 
or a crack in the rock. The ferns, the spreading 
junipers that look like mosses but have a substan- 
tial tap-root, the many lichens are more tenacious. 
The black streaks that drip down the great walls 
and look like ink-stains will be found on examina- 
tion to be merely flat beds of tiny black lichens, 
clinging in the waterway of the walls and gaining 
support from the occasional showers. 

These strange growths, that in measure retard the 
processes of erosion, how they hold fast to the rocks 
and ^ght off heat and drought! They are not, 
strictly speaking, desert plants, but they have the 
desert instinct of self-preservation. They grow 
here in the dry air with morning and afternoon shade 
to favor them, but they are hardly native to the 
place, and their existence is always precarious. In 
fact, they pass out as you descend to warmer and 
more arid levels and the more positive desert 
growths come in. 

Five hundred feet of descent and you are per- 
haps in a position to see the face-walls of the Kaibab 
and the Coconino. They are not seen to the best 
advantage on this trail, but even here how massive 
they appear in their bulk and how impressive they 



BKIGHT ANGEL AND HERMIT TRAILS 95 

are in their feeling of deep foundations ! And look 
up at their height — their lift into the blue ! Occa- 
sionally, as you are looking up at them, you may 
see their fairy continuation in the sky — thousands 
of feet of cumulus-cloud walls, piled high toward 
the zenith, and struck by the afternoon sun. 

Here, too, is the opportunity to see the fluting of 
the Rim as it cuts against the sky. There is a 
marked regularity about it, especially as you move 
farther down and away from it and see it in more 
general outlines. You will notice also as you de- 
scend that the blue sky seems to fit in the flutings 
like ^n inlay of lapis lazuli. And, below it, as 
evening comes on, the rose hue of the Coconino 
shifts into a rose-amethyst. What wonderful colors ! 

After you have passed the tunnel — a few feet 
beyond it and at the left — ^you can see the line of 
faulting in the strata that made possible the Bright 
Angel Trail. It was this dislocation of the rock 
that invited the water-wear and resulted finally 
in the whole lateral canyon you are descending being 
cut back into the Rim. Below the tunnel you come 
to a turn in the trail where the light Coconino can 
be seen meeting the dark Supai. The sharpness of 
the demarcation, the evenness of the joining are 
astonishing when you think of the centuries that 
have gone to the original bedding, the subsequent 
upheavals, the pressures, the erosions. None of 



96 THE GRAND CANYON 

these things seems to have greatly disturbed the 
beds. 

The color change in the strata, from the pale 
salmon of the Coconino to the red of the Supai, can 
be noticed in the loose dirt of the trail as well 
as on the face-walls. The iron-rust in the Supai 
reddens everything it touches, even your shoes and 
clothes. The rock is a soft sandstone and shale, 
but only comparatively so. When you move down 
still lower and come to the steps or ledges of the 
Battleship you will perhaps think them hard enough. 
Those steps grow enormously in size as you ap- 
proach them. And the higher slopes and terraces 
of the Battleship that from the Rim looked like 
places for a pleasant stroll, turn into tangled arroyos 
and washed-out canyons. Before the stroller reaches 
the turreted top he will have had a very rough 
scramble among bushes and boulders he never 
suspected were there. These slopes of the buttes 
are full of odd surprises. 

Farther down on the left side of the trail and at 
the end of one of the zigzags you will be able to 
step out a few feet on a ledge overlooking a deep 
circus cut back into the Supai. A wall that can 
stand intact and support such a great weight is 
perhaps not so soft as we have implied. Terms 
at the Canyon are always comparative. This cir- 
cus, for example, might be thought tremendous in 



BRIGHT ANGEL AND HERMIT TRAILS 97 

size anywhere else, but here there are many that 
go far beyond It. Yet how imposing and how beau- 
tiful it is ! What a swing to the half-circle ! What 
a space it encloses ! The cliff-swallows and sparrow- 
hawks dash around it, but they are so small you do 
not readily see them. Occasionally a vulture sweeps 
through it on stiff wings and then up and out, but 
even he looks dwarfed. The space is really enor- 
mous. Picturesque? Yes, very; but for all its 
superb lines and splendid color, you would find 
diflSculty in making a picture of it. It is too big. 

The Canyon widens as you descend and the walls 
fall back, so that when you are on a level with the 
Red Wall the cliffs are quite a distance from the 
trail. The scoops out of the faces that, from EI 
Tovar, look as though done by a sharp-pointed 
shovel working in soft clay, now appear as great 
amphitheatres. There are two of these at the right 
of the trail going down. One of them has an added 
recess at the back that seems almost as though de- 
signed for a stage. Over it is a colossal hanging 
roof hollowed out from beneath by rain and wind. 
Such a theatre might hold an army or a race. The 
mind refuses to think in thousands before such a 
stupendous enclosure. 

At the foot of the Red Wall the Tonto begins, 
not in walls but in greenish-yellow taluses and 
slopes. There is a breakdown of these softer rocks 



98 THE GRAND CANYON 

into graceful arroyos, rounded divides, and flat- 
backed platforms that dip gracefully toward the 
trail and toward the River. Here, too, the vegeta- 
tion changes to something more desert-like in char- 
acter. Mesquite grows in the dry washes, cactus 
and a false sage on the slopes, Spanish bayonet, 
yucca, and mescal along the trail. The Spanish 
bayonet, sometimes called soapweed, grows about 
two feet above the ground, has a foot of white 
flowers, and bears a fruit as large as a cucumber 
or a pear. The Indians dry it for food. The yucca 
grows ten feet in height and has often two or three 
feet of creamy bell-shaped flowers. Belonging to 
the same family is a still loftier growth, the shaft 
sometimes reaching up fourteen feet and bearing 
four or Eve feet of small yellow flowers, followed 
in season by yellow pears an inch or two long 
and round like a lead-pencil. This is locally called 
"mescal," but mescal is merely the Mexican drink 
distilled from its root. The growth is a variety of 
the maguey {agave Americana). In the old days 
the Indians used it for food, roasting the root of it 
in stone pits. The remains of the pits are still 
found in and about the Canyon. 

A spring of water now comes to life beside the 
trail. Almost everywhere in the Canyon the 
water-line seems to coincide with Indian Garden 
on Bright Angel. That is, water if it comes to the 



BRIGHT ANGEL AND HERMIT TRAILS 99 

surface at all, is usually found coming through the 
shales of the Supai or under the Red Wall, though 
Dripping Springs in Hermit Basin comes from under 
the Coconino. Indian Garden is merely a small 
oasis brought into existence by the stream that runs 
through it. There is nothing remarkable in the 
fact that trees such as the cottonwood and the 
willow, with reeds, trailing grape, garden vegetables, 
and flowers should grow there. It would be more 
remarkable if they did not. Nor is there anything 
very romantic about the camp or its history. Un- 
doubtedly the Indians once used the water to grow 
corn and melons, but of recent years the Garden 
has been in possession of white men, with miner's 
and squatter's claims as a basis for a prolonged 
quarrel among them. 

At the Garden a side-trail branches off to the left 
on the platform overlooking the Granite Gorge, 
while the main trail goes on down to the River. 
The first-mentioned way branches again in less than 
a mile, one part of it leading off to the left and 
around under the walls to Hermit Camp. The dis- 
tance to Hermit is something like twenty miles, and 
here the worthy mule may be resorted to without 
prejudice. The trip gives one an excellent idea of 
the face- walls and lower platforms (Plate 18). The 
slopes are very beautiful in both their lines and 
colors, the sparse vegetation is interesting in odd 



100 THE GRAND CANYON 

growths of cacti and the false sage, the latter botan- 
ically referred to as '' a rosaceous shrub " (Coleogyne 
ramosissima) ; and the rock shelvings of the Tapeats 
in the lateral canyons are fantastic, novel, often im- 
pressive in scale. 

The Tonto slopes are not merely interesting 
trailways for the human but they are the stamping- 
ground for many wild burros that live down there 
and break the midnight silence with their brayings. 
They are only half wild and may be roped easily 
enough from a fast horse, though they are not to be 
captured afoot. A few mountain-sheep are still in 
the Canyon but they keep well up on the slopes in 
hidden pockets where they are not easily seen. 
The bighorn has a yellow-gray coat, stands still 
against yellow-gray walls, and even if he were di- 
rectly before you, you would have difficulty in 
seeing him. Originally he was the first breaker and 
maker of the trails that run along the Tonto plat- 
forms, but the burro has usurped his pathway. 
The coyote, too, is here, running the slopes at night 
and sleeping under the rock ledges by day; but his 
living is not entirely satisfactory, and his tribe is 
not increasing. As much might be said for the 
yellow lizards with black collars, the coral snakes 
with white stripes, the side-winders, the horned 
toads (gray and pink, after their kind), and all the 
desert crew that creep and crawl. They are here 
but not in large numbers. 



BRIGHT ANGEL AND HEEMIT TRAILS 101 

These platforms are rather hot barren spots. 
They break down to the Tapeats cliffs overhanging 
the Granite Gorge, which are hotter and even more 
barren. Occasionally some cactus or juniper or 
flower grows out of the crevices of the Tapeats or 
the Archaean rock, but usually it is short-lived. The 
Archaean had the life burned out of it many centu- 
ries ago, and it is now only so much fused splendor 
of color. One gets a good idea of its grim surface 
and twisted strata by continuing down the last lap 
of the Bright Angel Trail from Indian Garden 
(Plate 13). For those who do not wish to go down 
the DeviFs Corkscrew to the River a good view of 
the Inner Gorge and the Archaean rock may be had 
from the Turtlehead or anywhere along the Tapeats 
cliffs. 

The Hermit is the second of the important trails 
from the Rim to the River. It starts in at Hermit's 
Rest, half a dozen miles west of El Tovar, and may 
be travelled either afoot or by mule. The trail is 
something like eight miles from top to bottom, is 
not at all dangerous, and quite as interesting in its 
way as the Bright Angel. At the start it is an open 
trail, with no Douglas spruces, few bushes, and com- 
paratively barren slopes. Small gritty stones under- 
foot in the zigzags of the trail testify to the hardness 
of the Kaibab and the Coconino. When the Supai 
is reached the trail not only changes from gray to 
red but the stones disappear in favor of loose dirt. 



102 THE GRAND CANYON 

After entering Hermit Gorge, fifteen hundred 
feet down, the Canyon begins to narrow and the 
trail grows steeper. The Gorge itself should be fol- 
lowed back to one of its sources by making the side- 
trip to Dripping Springs. The trail there leads off 
from the Hermit Trail, before the Gorge is reached, 
and carries you to the head of a steep canyon where 
water drips from the Coconino rock. On the way to 
this spring one sees the great cut in the Supai form- 
ing the head of Hermit Creek. The Gorge lower 
down opens out into a canyon with a line of green 
trees and bushes in its bed showing the continued 
presence of water. This canyon is an excellent illus- 
tration of the erosive power of the lateral streams. 

A sign "The Red Zigzags" appears. Here there 
is not only a fine view of the Red Wall across the 
valley but also down at the right a broad view of the 
Tonto formation with the waving lines of its plat- 
forms. Notice should be taken of the reds and 
greens in the little butte just beneath you and the 
superb lines of the high buttes across the River, 
especially in the taluses that sweep down in long 
curves to the little valleys with their dry stream- 
beds. A thousand or more feet above Hermit 
Camp the trail turns east under a huge red cliff of 
Supai, and at the base of it is an outcrop of violet 
shale very beautiful in color. 

At Cathedral Stairs the trail runs through a mix- 
ture of Supai and Red Wall. The latter lies straight 




From a photograph, copyrighted by Fred Harvey. 

Plate 16. HERMIT TRAIL, RIVER END. 

Through Tapeats sandstone, Camp middle distance, Pima Point against 

sky. 



BRIGHT ANGEL AND HERMIT TRAILS 103 

ahead, and its staining from the Supai above it is 
quite apparent. Around to the left, connected by a 
thin ridge, is a promontory of Red Wall called 
Cope Butte that is fast being cut away from its 
parent rock (Plate 4). You will notice that its 
color is not red but mouldy salmon with something 
of greenish-gray in it. There is no Supai bed above 
it to stain it, and something of its blue-gray local 
color has begun to come back to it. 

The trail winds on and away from the wall, out 
on the long platforms of the Tonto. Hermit Camp 
is located on one of the Tonto platforms under the 
lea of a high protruding promontory called The 
Lookout (Plate 22). The view from the camp is 
commanding. Across the River the buttes and the 
Rim rise like mountains — a little like the Dolomites. 
The Red Wall to the west, with the Supai, Coconino, 
and Kaibab strata atop of it, is magnificent; while 
to the east is a huge amphitheatre in the Red Wall 
along the roof of which runs the trail you descended, 
and above which rise in majestic flights the giant 
steps of Pima Point. 

The Tonto platforms, in rolling ridges, are all 
about you, their wonderful yellow-green color- 
ing showing to advantage in a steep bank directly 
back of the camp. Little vegetation appears on 
these platforms aside from cacti, the maguey. Mor- 
mon tea, the false sage. In the Hermit Creek bed 
to the west of the camp there is the usual tangle 



104 THE GRAND CANYON 

of ash, willow, mesquite, wild grape, tules. The 
creek itself is a small trout-stream but with no 
trout. Originally there were beaver in it (as also 
in the Colorado), but there are no gnawings or chip- 
pings of trees to indicate their presence to-day. It 
is an innocent-looking stream, but when it turns 
red with cloudbursts it churns and thunders like a 
cataract. You can follow its course to the River 
for a mile below the camp and all the way down, 
through the stiff Tapeats and the harder Archaean 
wall, you can see how it has ripped and torn its way, 
making gorges, small canyons, caves, and water- 
falls, apparently with no effort whatever (Plate 20). 
The stream is widening its course below the 
camp, but if you follow it back in the strata for a 
mile you will find a narrow deep defile in the rock 
where water in flood boils and seethes, and rocks 
are rolled and battered against the walls as violently 
as in the Granite Gorge (Plate 6). In summer 
drought there are sections of the creek that are 
quite dry save for pot-holes or catch-basins in the 
rock that hold stagnant water. Birds come down 
to splash in these shallow pools, and snakes lie in 
wait beside them for the birds, and wild burros 
kick at the snakes and paw at the blue-green waters. 
They are not still waters beside which one wishes to 
camp and cook. Water, of any kind, is always more 
or less of an oddity in desert lands, but the caught 
pool soon becomes an offense. 



BRIGHT ANGEL AND HERMIT TRAILS 105 



To the east of Hermit Camp a trail runs over the 
ridges of the Tonto into the basin of Monument 
Creek and thus around to Indian Garden on the 
Bright Angel. The views that one gets in and about 
Monument Creek and its upper drainage area, 
called the Abyss, are well worth a day's journey in 
the wilderness. The breadth of the basin, the am- 
phitheatres, the lift and wind of the walls, the creek- 
bed that cuts through the Tapeats and the Archaean, 
are all superb. 

To the west of Hermit Creek there is a continu- 
ation of the trail whereby one passes over into 
Boucher Creek and beyond. It is possible by fol- 
lowing this rather blind trail to worry along the 
slopes of the Tonto down to Bass Ferry, or, for that 
matter, to indefinite distances. The slopes lend 
themselves readily to exploration. And they be- 
come more interesting as the trail fades out. The 
vegetation does not materially change, but the ani- 
mal life increases and the primeval quality of the 
landscape, the remoteness and aloofness of it, grow 
apace with the distance removed from hotel and 
camp. Nature undefiled always lies rather far 
afield. 



CHAPTER IX 
OTHER RIVER-TRAILS 

There are a dozen trails down to the River from 
the South Rim, but the hotel talk revolves, almost 
exclusively, about Bright Angel and Hermit. The 
mule and the guide are easily obtained for these 
well-worn ways, but there is little enthusiasm or 
eagerness about a trip down Boucher or Bass or 
Hance Trails. The going is not so good, they are 
some distance from El Tovar, and, after all, the 
mule has his rights, that should be respected. But 
mules are to be had, and guides, too, if you insist. 
You can also get along quite unaided of either if 
you are so minded. 

The Bass Trail is thirty-two miles to the north- 
west of El Tovar and can be readily reached by 
wagon or automobile. It is a miner's trail and much 
narrower and rougher than either Bright Angel or 
Hermit. Occasionally it goes blind or is confused 
with side-windings made by wild burros. In fol- 
lowing these faint trails one should look twenty or 
thirty yards ahead and get the general run or trend 
rather than spend time over hoof-marks or discolora- 
tions of the soil. 

From the Rim in front of Bass Camp the trail 

106 



OTHER RIVER-TRAILS 107 

descends by long zigzags. You do not creep down 
them, as a fly down a diagonal crack in a wall, 
but walk upright as upon any other hillside path- 
way. It is not at all hazardous, though it may be 
a trifle lonesome. A thousand feet down you cross 
the Darwin Plateau. Carved through this rock 
platform is a deep gorge that causes one to stare. 
It is usually dry — an empty channel cut in the rock 
— but with a cloudburst one can easily imagine it a 
roaring torrent. The huge boulders in the bed, 
some of them weighing twenty tons or more, give 
suggestion of the pushing power of water. Beyond 
it one reaches the foot of Mt. Huethawali — a conical 
butte the Supai base of which spreads out and down 
in taluses beautifully waved and fluted. If you 
follow around this butte you will find it belted by 
drainage streams that originally cut it away from 
the Rim. On the River side of it a hazy trail leads 
off across Spencer Terrace to Fiske Butte. 

The walk of a mile or more along Spencer Terrace 
is over flat Supai rock, pitted with round holes, 
where shallow catches of rain-water stand and grow 
green, and where more boulders weighing tons 
seem to have been rolled out and abandoned by a 
race of giants. Here and there, from thin cracks 
in the rock, grow grasses, two or three varieties of 
the maguey, yucca palms, dwarf pinyons; but there 
are acres and acres of the red floor where nothing at 



108 THE GRAND CANYON 



all grows. The fall of the foot upon It, the dull iron 
sound of it are strangely impressive. As you travel 
on you appear to be drifting far away from human- 
ity, from civilization, from the modern world. The 
rock under you seems very ancient and yet not old 
enough for a livable world. Soil has not yet been 
ground from it; the globe is only a ball of impure 
metal, and the Carboniferous age has hardly begun. 
In spite of geological chronology you feel as though 
you might, by looking about you, see some mon- 
strous lizard a hundred feet long lying at length in 
the sun, or some sabre-toothed tiger creeping out 
of a sandstone cave. It is a lonely, silent spot 
where not even the Pre-Adamites seem to have place. 
As you go down to the extreme point of Fiske 
Butte overlooking the River (an ancient Canyon- 
lover has named it Montevideo) the loneliness sud- 
denly turns into frightfulness. At the left, directly 
under your feet, is a true-enough precipice. It 
drops for I know not how many hundred or thou- 
sand feet. The thought of it makes you uncomfort- 
able. There is another drop, at the right — another 
precipice. You seem to have crept out on a spur 
of rock into space. Over the extreme point of the 
spur, looking down, is the turbulent River. The 
roar of it, the sway of it, the reel of the great depth 
itself make you giddy. You back away. The 
view is magnificent but too aeroplanic for pleasure. 



OTHER RIVER-TRAILS 109 

There are terraces, similar to the Spencer, at the 
west; and others to the east, called Huxley Terrace 
and Grand Scenic Divide, that afford superb out- 
looks upon the Inner Canyon and the buttes across 
the River. A great bend in the Colorado comes in 
just here and the character of the Canyon scenery 
begins to change. West of the Divide the buttes 
go out, the promontories grow longer, the Canyon 
flattens in depth and becomes somewhat less impos- 
ing in grandeur. But you are not made very con- 
scious of this from where you stand. All the ter- 
races within view are much alike in their rock floors, 
their flat reach, their precipices, and their feeling of 
remoteness. 

The Bass Trail continues down to the River from 
the head of the steep canyon between the Divide 
and Mt. Huethawali. The descent is rapid and 
somewhat more exciting than at Hermit Creek but 
not nerve-racking. Like every trail in the Canyon 
it abounds in quick turns, strange surprises, aston- 
ishing walls, superb vistas. After passing down the 
Tonto slopes there is another quick descent to the 
Colorado, where at one time a suspension ferry with 
a cage running on a wire carried general plunder 
across the River. It was a part of a mining enter- 
prise, and of recent years has been operated only 
sporadically. 

From the Tonto there are dim trails leading to the 



110 THE GRAND CANYON 

east and west across the slopes and around under 
the Red Wall. They lead on indefinitely. In fact, 
the whole length of the Grand Canyon can be 
traversed on these Tonto slopes that flatten out 
under the great walls. The place is not so inacces- 
sible as it looks at first blush. You are told of two 
or three trails and given to understand that beyond 
them there are no thoroughfares. But the under- 
standing is misunderstanding. There are many 
trails that the average person can travel on mule- 
back, and many others where an expert climber 
properly shod can go with little danger. The dan- 
ger lies in wearing heavily nailed boots, pigskin 
puttees, fashionable khaki; and in burdening one- 
self with water-bottles, lunch-boxes, opera-glasses, 
and revolvers. They are all unnecessary on a six 
or eight hour trip. One should dress in cotton shirt 
and light trousers, wear rubber sneakers in lieu of 
moccasins, and carry a thin eight-foot alpenstock. 
You are then prepared to depart from the trail, 
vault crevices, travel foot-sure along the edge of 
precipices, or creep around narrow points and 
ledges. As for food and water, any athlete or In- 
dian will tell you that you can travel better without 
them. They are good things at the end of the trip 
but not at the beginning. 

The only other trail (on the map) to the west of El 
Tovar is the Boucher, that starts in near Dripping 
Springs, goes down the west side of Hermit Creek, 



OTHER RIVER-TRAILS 111 

and winds around under Yuma and Cocopah Points 
to the River. It is a difficult trail and one that has 
bad spots for both man and beast. Few people 
go down it, so it need not be described. 

To the east of El Tovar there are at least three 
well-known trails. The nearest is that at Grand 
View. In common with the other Canyon trails 
this one is the result of copper having been dis- 
covered under the Supai slopes. The remnants of 
a copper camp are still down there, and the riprapped 
trail still suggests the one-time burro pack-train. 
It is in fair condition, though little used. There 
are some sharp rocky descents but they are not peril- 
ous. The trail should be taken directly in front of 
Grand View Point. Nearly a mile back, on the road 
to the point, a sign indicates that the trail starts on 
the right of the sign. It should be disregarded. 
That is the head of an old trail which is now aban- 
doned, filled with slides of stone and crisscrossed 
by fallen trees. It is not possible to go down it on 
a mule, and even afoot there are places where it 
leads around the edge of precipices decidedly dis- 
concerting to the inexperienced. After a mile or 
more of rough travelling this old trail comes out and 
joins the new trail, which leads down directly from 
the end of Grand View Point. There is nothing 
gained by taking the old trail except a possible 
fright from worrying around steep walls. 

The new trail is steep enough — ^much steeper than 



112 THE GRAND CANYON 

Bright Angel or Hermit. There are several descents 
along the walls of the Kaibab and Coconino so 
abrupt that discretion may suggest getting down 
and out of the saddle. The trail falls rapidly, turns 
sharply, winds under huge cliffs. Five hundred 
feet down a fault between the Kaibab and the Co- 
conino makes possible the crossing of a saddle where 
there are not only distant views in both directions 
but excellent near views of the cross-bedding in the 
Coconino. A thousand feet under the Rim the 
transition from the Coconino to the Supai is not 
only sudden but dramatic. The trail crosses another 
saddle, and a view of Grand View Basin appears 
framed up between towering walls. The most 
rugged and striking scenery of the Canyon appears 
here. If it were not for the coloring you might 
fancy yourself in some pass of the Tyrol. Farther 
down, the trail winds along ledges of the Supai and 
gradually flattens out as it descends to the Horse- 
shoe Mesa. From thence on you are in open 
country, the high walls are behind you and plat- 
forms and terraces are ahead of you. Before reach- 
ing the mesa you pass through the old copper camp 
with its deserted buildings — interesting for its 
wrecked hopes and general air of failure rather than 
for its picturesqueness. 

A trail runs off from the east of the camp and leads 
down to the River; but there is more to be seen 



OTHER RIVER-TRAILS 113 

from the points of the Horseshoe. For there one 
gets a sweeping view all around the circle, no matter 
which point is chosen for observation. Looking 
backward is impressive for the magnificence of the 
cliffs; looking north across the River to the buttes 
and promontories of the North Rim is just as im- 
pressive, for now you seem to see a mountain range 
with foot-hills — desert mountains with their splendid 
warmth of color. The buttes apparently pile up at 
the back until the Kaibab on the North Rim seems 
the central ridge of the range. There is a wonder 
of grandeur in these stepped heights reaching up 
into the blue of heaven. And this is only a part of 
the scene. 

Standing on the west point of the Horseshoe one 
sees the lower slopes as perhaps nowhere else in the 
Canyon. They seem broader, flatter, more spacious 
than at Hermit or Bright Angel. Their curving 
outlines, their waving contours, their great recesses 
and sweeping taluses show undulations such as one 
seldom sees in the earth surfaces. The southern 
sea sometimes heaves and rolls like that, but with 
less length of converging lines and less variety of 
color. Nothing grows on the slopes but the pseudo- 
sage that dots the surface and perhaps emphasizes 
the jade look of it; but was there ever a more won- 
derful piece of color ! It is not high in pitch; on 
the contrary, it is almost monotone and yet is stimu- 



114 THE GRAND CANYON 

lating because of the great mass of it and the splen- 
did sweep of it. Line and color supplement each 
other here. 

Under the west side of the Horseshoe is a lime- 
stone cave, a hundred or more feet in length, where 
one may see stalactites hanging from the walls and 
ceiling, but it hardly calls for a visit. On the east 
side are tunnels and shafts of the old copper-mine, 
but these, too, may be profitably skipped. The 
world in the sunlight seems more worth while than 
these merely curious depths in the earth. Besides, 
both the cave and the mine can be seen in better 
examples elsewhere. 

Across from the points of the Horseshoe is the 
wall of the Inner Canyon — the old Archaean rock. 
It is not less grim here than at Bright Angel. The 
chaos of its mixture, the dead desolation of it, the 
poppy purple of the coloring make it uncanny; and 
wonder not unmixed with apprehension goes along 
with each new view of it. There is a feeling of 
fire and fusion, as though all the beds and minerals 
had been stirred in a huge melting-pot and finally 
flung up white hot and allowed to cool as slag. 
And through these purple walls the pour of the swift, 
the red, the roaring River ! 

The trail winds on down the Tonto slopes of the 
west point, down to the water. You may not be in- 
clined to follow it to the end. The better views are 



OTHER RIVER-TRAILS 115 

from the higher platforms. Moreover, such animal 
and vegetable life as exists here is seen on the upper 
terraces. But there is little life at best. The burro 
and the jack-rabbit occasionally break away through 
the thin brush, but the lizard and the horned toad 
under a rock, with the side-winder under a cactus, 
are the real natives of the soil. One hears the jangle 
of the jay in the scrub-cedars or pinyons, and at 
night the mournful call of the poor-will — neither of 
them soothing sounds. Occasionally, too, the vul- 
ture — that jackal of the air — slips across the Horse- 
shoe, exciting wonder for his masterful sailing, and 
at evening bats and owls come out of the caves 
seeking what they may devour. But none of the 
crew could be accounted pleasant company. All 
life down here is a bit savage or gruesome. And by 
the same token the lower slopes are weirdly wonder- 
ful in form and color but not places for a long stay. 
One gets back to the Rim, where the cliff-rose is 
blooming, where the smell of the yellow pine is on 
the breeze and the note of the robin in the air, 
with a feeling of relief. 

To the east of Grand View about two miles is the 
old Hance Ranche, and a mile or more farther east 
one strikes the Hance Trail. It goes down Red 
Canyon to the right of Coronado Butte, but as no 
one seems to have used it since the hope of mineral 
wealth died out in the Canyon, it is not in very good 



116 THE GRAND CANYON 

condition. The only footprints I discovered in it in 
the summer of 1918 were made by wild burros. Any 
one can go up or down it, for it is passable, but it is 
not more interesting than other and smoother trails. 

Beyond the Hance to the east there is no open 
trail until Lincoln Point is reached. This is two 
miles to the west of Desert View, which is to say, 
some thirty miles or more from El Tovar. There is 
a good automobile road the entire distance. The 
trail-head is a little blind. It is about two hundred 
yards east of the point and is to be found by follow- 
ing the Rim. 

This Lincoln Trail is not very broad. Perhaps 
originally it was a runway made by deer going down 
from the Rim to water. It is, if I am not mistaken, 
the old Tanner Trail, and was perhaps known to 
Major Powell when he came through the Colorado 
canyons. In 1918 I could find no trace of any- 
thing in the dust of it but the hoofs of deer and the 
pads of coyotes. No one had been over it for a 
year or more. Now that the travelling public is 
beginning to recognize the eastern as the most 
picturesque end of the Grand Canyon, this trail 
will no doubt come into more use. It is not a diffi- 
cult descent, and has its attractions, though it is 
behind Grand View in walls and behind Bright 
Angel in general interest. The Kaibab is not so 
thick in strata here as farther west, the Coconino 



OTHER RIVER-TRAILS 117 

is much tilted and broken in its cross-bedding, and 
the Tonto flattens down into wide-rolling terraces. 

Aside from the caves in the walls and some In- 
dian pictographs on boulders in a dry bed at the 
right of the trail, there is little to note until one 
reaches a level ridge or hogback crossing a trans- 
verse valley some fifteen hundred feet down. The 
trail follows across this red ridge, which is now the 
divide between an eastern and western valley. 
This divide is being cut away, and eventually will 
disappear, leaving the great bench ahead separated 
from the main southern wall. It is another case 
of butte-and-promontory making in process, and 
how savage the process you can see by looking down 
at the left into the chasm which has already been 
cut out of the rock. 

After crossing the red divide there are two or 
three miles of winding around the Supai slopes. 
Seen from the Rim the trail seems to lie flat, but the 
traveller down there finds that it has its decided 
ups and downs. It is over a desert bench or 
platform that grows dwarf cedars, yuccas, Spanish 
bayonets, cacti, sage, bunch-grass — all of them 
flushed in coloring from lack of soil and moisture, 
and from perhaps some copper in the shale. The 
platform seems isolated and rather devoid of animal 
life, though there are traces of deer and coyotes 
here and there, with birds such as the horned lark. 



118 THE GRAND CANYON 

the dove, the jay, the flicker. As for snakes, horned 
toads, and Hzards, they seem much at home on the 
red shale and under the magenta-colored cactus. 

This platform has deep canyons on its south and 
east which break out to the River, leaving the plat- 
form itself standing with perpendicular cliffs. At 
the edge of it looking south you are facing a portion 
of the Red Wall, above this the Supai shales shelve 
down in long slopes, and still higher the Coconino 
and the Kaibab — the former much cross-bedded — 
join with some confusion. To the east Comanche 
Point comes out at you like the prow of a colossal 
battleship, and to the left of it, stretching beyond the 
mouth of the Little Colorado, is a parapet of cliffs 
known as the Palisades of the Desert. Very ma- 
jestic is this parapet, with its high lift, its long 
sweep, its feeling of strength and endurance. 

But the impressive view here, before you make 
the final lap of the trail, is from the cliff directly 
overlooking the River. You go out across rolling 
slopes to the edge, where you meet with a swift 
drop of perhaps a thousand feet. You are atop of 
the Red Wall and the drop is into a pot-hole made up 
of shelving slopes of the greenish Tonto and the 
raspberry-red beds of the old Unkar. The color of 
this basin is most astonishing! Maroon marls, 
fire oxides, jade greens appear everywhere. And 
these are woven into and across slopes with lines 




< 

H 

O 
H 
% 
O 
H 

Z 
O 




OTHER RIVER-TRAILS 119 

dipping swiftly downward to the bottom of the 
basin. The look over the edge is fascinating but 
also somewhat fearsome. There is something about 
the pit that suggests fire and brimstone. The cold 
crater of a volcano is less indicative of Nature's in- 
ternal fires than this beautiful bowl in the Canyon. 

The inner walls of the Granite Gorge break down 
and run out just here. On the north side all the 
strata have a dip or inclination to the southeast, and 
following that dip the old Archaean walls eventually 
disappear. The first impression is that the River 
has risen, but, on the contrary, it is the strata that 
have fallen. 

The River is finally reached by the zigzags of the 
trail down and over the shales of the Tonto. When 
you come close to it the size and movement of it 
give you something of a surprise. It makes sharp 
turnings here, is flung against perpendicular walls, 
is shot over huge bed boulders, and is churned into 
yellow foam. Farther up, looking toward the mouth 
of the Little Colorado, the stream runs in the open 
for some distance. It is a rapid stream everywhere, 
though there are stretches of it that lie flat and 
smooth, and in the late afternoon when the sun is 
low, these stretches are not sand-hued but show a 
terra-cotta or a Venetian red. Perhaps the Span- 
iards, seeing that flush, named the stream Colorado 
— that is red, or reddish. 



120 THE GRAND CANYON 



Two miles to the east of Lincoln Trail is Desert 
View. A comfortable camp has recently been es- 
tablished there. From this camp it is possible to 
make excursions on the Painted Desert, along the 
Palisades, and (by crossing the Little Colorado) to 
the Marble Canyon and beyond. You will be told 
at the start that there is no trail and that you can- 
not get around to Comanche Point except by going 
back in the forest several miles and taking an old 
Mormon wagon-road. But you need not mind 
either the road or the information. Follow the 
Rim to the east and you will come out on the Co- 
manche Point side of the Canyon in less than an 
hour. Before you reach it an old wagon-trail in- 
dicates that you can go over to Cedar Mountain 
and from there to the cliffs of the Little Colorado. 
The trip on foot from Desert View to Cedar Moun- 
tain is two hours and from thence to the Little 
Colorado two hours more; but to descend and cross 
the Little Colorado you must go farther to the 
southeast and pick up the Mormon road. That is 
the only accessible route to the main stretches of the 
Painted Desert and the Marble Canyon. 

Between Desert View and Cedar Mountain there 
is a nebulous trail leading down into the Canyon as 
far as the top of the Red Wall, but whether the en- 
tire way to the River, I am not able to say. It is a 
deer-run and not the kind of trail the average visitor 



OTHER RIVER-TRAILS 121 

cares to travel. The animals living on the Coco- 
nino Plateau in the heat of summer must have 
water occasionally, and there being none on the 
plateau they go down to the River, following the 
dry beds of pitching streams. The result is the 
deer or sheep run that in time becomes a burro- 
trail, and in the latest stage a mule-trail for tourists. 
Eventually, no doubt, the enterprising capitalist 
will put up a funicular or aerial railway that will 
drop people into the Canyon in fifteen minutes, but 
for the nonce the picturesque trail is the only way 
to the River. It is to be hoped that it will always 
remain to worry the indolent and make glad the 
heart of the wilderness-lover. 



CHAPTER X 
THE COLORADO 

It seems rather odd that looking over the lip one 
cannot see the inside of the cup, that standing on 
the Rim one cannot see into the Inner Canyon. 
From certain outstanding points one hears the 
River's voice and knows that it is cutting and 
grinding down deeper and deeper into its Archaean 
bed, and from other points it appears in spots and 
flashes; but it is at best an evanescent, a hidden, 
river. From El Tovar it is not seen at all. 

Down at the Turtlehead, or elsewhere along the 
Tapeats cliffs, one gets moving-picture views of it 
in elongated sections. It is just below you some 
twelve hundred feet, runs fast, and flashes much. 
Its roughened surface and its rumbling shock say 
that it is a river of might, but even now you do not 
comprehend the force of it. You should go down 
and stand beside it at the mouth of Hermit Creek. 
That is the most accessible place for the visitor and 
also one of the most impressive in the Canyon so 
far as the display of power in the water is con- 
cerned. 

The trail down from Hermit Camp follows 

122 



THE COLORAX)0 123 



through deep gorges of Tapeats sandstone much 
eaten into by wind, rain, and flood (Plate 20). It 
is not long before you meet with a change to walls 
of Archaean rock, with strata twisted and bent at 
every angle (Plate 16). The creek has cut through 
these rocks on its way to the River, but just now it 
is a mere babbling brook. You soon lose the babble 
in a hum that keeps increasing as you descend. 
Presently you debouch at grade rather unexpect- 
edly. The tossing River is before you, and the 
shock of it in that narrow canyon is almost like that 
of Niagara. 

It is not very wide and apparently not very deep, 
but how it does pitch and leap and surge and swing ! 
The downward sweep of it is not greater perhaps 
than you have seen in other rivers, but somehow 
there is a feeling of weight to the water here. You 
may be a strong swimmer but you would not like 
to trust yoiu'self in that current. Even in a strong 
boat there would be distinct perils. Why is that ? 
What is it that suggests abnormal push, fierce un- 
restrained power in the water? 

The local color of the stream in the month of 
June is a precise caje-au-lait. The foam tips and 
the spread of white froth along the shores even 
give the effect of whipped cream on the coffee. 
What makes this color? Surely the sand and silt 
carried in the water. It is both sand-colored and 



124 THE GRAND CANYON 

sand-laden. And that not only gives it the ap- 
pearance of having weight but is weight in itself. 
Liquefy the layers of the Coconino sandstone and 
set them in motion and you would have an ap- 
proach to the Colorado. It moves with a force out 
of all proportion to that of the Mississippi or the 
Columbia or the Yukon. The great power of it, 
especially when swollen with rains, is appalling, 
startling, even frightening. 

At the mouth of Hermit Creek, where you come 
out, there is swift water. The creek has thrown 
huge boulders into the River just here, has cut a 
deep trough in the channel, and lodged some of 
the largest of the boulders amid-stream. Above 
the rapid the water appears quite calm, but it moves 
in volume with a slipping slide that makes you just 
a little giddy if you watch it for a few minutes. 
In places it has a whirling spiral movement that is 
just as bewildering. It runs for no great distance 
before it begins to twist and writhe. And you may 
notice that, even when quite smooth upon the sur- 
face, the stream is higher in the middle than at the 
sides. As it moves down the heap-up of it in the 
middle increases. Before meeting the uneven 
boulder-bed at the creek mouth it has a trend and 
a tendency toward the right. It swings over to 
the shore opposite the creek entrance to get around 
the boulder-bed. Some of the water passes down 




From a photogravh by A. J. Baker, copyrighted by the Atchison, Topeka and 
Santa Fe Railroad. 

Plate 19. GRANITE GORGE. 

Colorado River running through Archaean rock. 



THE COLORADO 125 



that way in a rapid swirl but other portions of it 
begin to plunge over the boulders. 

If you study water rushing over a boulder you 
will notice that it plunges down with a swift curve. 
The heavy under-water moves so fast that the 
lighter top-water cannot keep up with it. The 
footing is cut out from beneath it by the under- 
water and it falls, or seems to leap back up-stream, 
as a crest of foam. If the oncoming water meets a 
boulder broadside or collides with another body of 
water, there is a sudden push up of dancing points 
or jets. These crests and jets are sometimes flimg 
ten or fifteen feet in air and then collapse with a 
great splash. The splash, in turn, sets waves in 
motion that swash up against the walls and along 
the boulder-lined shores. 

The waves of a rapid have forms that apparently 
stand still in the stream. The water itself moves, 
but in such perpetual flow that the waves are never 
allowed to subside or disappear. A boat going 
over the waves follows the rush of waters, rising 
over ridges and sinking into hollows. When the 
boat meets a wave so high that its crest seems to 
leap back up-stream then there is danger, especially 
if the boat moves broadside instead of bow on to 
the wave. The craft may wash full of water or 
capsize. This is one of the dangers that has always 
confronted the River navigators. Dellenbaugh 



126 THE GIIAND CANYON 

states that the Soekdolger Rapid has waves from 
twenty to thirty feet high.* Imagine plunging at 
such a water-ridge with a sixteen-foot boat ! 

The water that rushes over and down the back of 
boulders into sunken pits in the bed comes to the 
surface again farther on in boiling geysers — circles 
from a few inches to ten feet in diameter that surge 
up from below as from the depths of a caldron. 
They flatten down and push out waves that, again, 
beat and sound on the rocky shores. Their bubble 
and their boil with their swish and swash add 
to the great roar. All of them mingle with a vast 
undertone that seems to come from beneath the 
River's bed — a sound like that of rolling stones 
over an iron floor. At times it is hollow and rum- 
bles with a suggestion of the volcanic — a suggestion 
enhanced perhaps by the enclosing walls of fire-rock. 

How far removed is this River roar from 

" a noise like a hidden brook 
In the leafy month of June 
That to the sleepy woods all night 
Singeth a quiet tune ! " 

As you stand there by the shore the jar of it makes 
the rock you are standing upon respond with a 
half-shiver. The thunder goes on and is echoed 
and re-echoed from the upright walls of the 

* Dellenbaugh, A Canyon Voyage, p. 226. New York, 1908. 



THE COLORADO 127 



gorge until the whole depth becomes choked with 
sound that cannot get out save by rising straight 
overhead. 

Why should it cause one fear ? What is there in 
mere sound to make one tremble? You laugh at 
the idea, and yet after a few minutes it comes back 
at you like a gadfly. The roar produces entirely 
too much bombardment to please either the senses 
or the nerves. The rapid water is fascinating to 
watch for a time, but the hurly-burly of it will dis- 
turb the poise of all but the most phlegmatic. 
Powell and others who went through the canyons 
by boat grew very weary of it notwithstanding 
many rests in the quiet reaches of the stream. 

The shock of sound seems to grow more intense 
after dark. Perhaps you have gone down to Her- 
mit or elsewhere on the recommendation of some 
enthusiast to see the River by starlight, and think 
to sleep in a warm sand-pocket under the Archaean 
wall. But you can no more sleep there than in a 
steel-mill. The clash of waters becomes a hideous 
din. In the middle of the night the stars go out 
and a thunder-storm comes up. You make a shift 
for shelter, clambering in the dark along the wall 
seeking some overhanging ledge. By accident per- 
haps you find a shallow cave, strike a match, and 
have a look around for snakes and scorpions. A 
few bats flutter into your retreat and cling to the 



128 THE GRAND CANTON 

ceiling. You settle down and so does the rain. 
Blinding flashes of pale-violet lightning explode be- 
fore you and illumine the gorge. The crack of the 
explosion follows instantly. Was there ever such 
a furor of sound ! The echo of it does not die 
out but seems to mingle with the roar of the River; 
or, to put it differently, the persistent roar of the 
River seems punctuated by crashes of thunder. 
One can imagine nothing in Nature's sounds more 
shattering to mental aplomb. 

The Hermit Creek rapid is not an unusual or ex- 
ceptional illustration. Wherever a creek or a dry 
bed of any size comes out and joins the Colorado, 
there you will find the swift current. The creek 
flings its carry into the River and a dam of boulders 
results, with its consequent collision of water. 
There are scores of these creek entrances in the 
Grand Canyon and hence scores of rapids. An 
additional one occasionally appears owing to the 
presence of some cross strata of crystalline rock in 
the bed. No wonder the explorers met with many 
disasters in trying to descend the stream. The 
River is still unnavigable. It still holds men back. 

In the stages of high water the fury of the torrent 
is greatly increased. The Colorado cannot expand 
and overrun its banks like the ordinary stream. It 
is held within iron walls that are in places twelve 
hundred feet high. All that the water can do is to 




From a photograph, copyrighted by Fred Harvey. 

Plate 20. HERMIT CREEK, LOWER REACH. 
Gorge through Tapeats rock, trail at left. Camp central, Red Wall at back. 



THE COLORADO 129 



rise on the walls and in effect deepen its volume. 
The marks of it show plainly enough that it some- 
times reaches a stage sixty feet above normal. 
The rush of it then is almost unbelievable. 

At its lowest stage in October or November the 
water often clears up in color and becomes, as Cap- 
tain Button describes it, " a pistachio green." The 
rapids then subside somewhat, and in places, such 
as that opposite Desert View (Plate 33), the River 
smooths its wrinkled front and slips along with 
measured calmness. But this summer face is only 
a temporary appearance. Usually there is a mad 
rush of waters through a trough of fire-rock, and 
nothing can greatly modify either its madness or 
its might. 

It is a splintered waterway where the Colorado 
runs, and perhaps some of its sharpness is due to 
its geological newness. As already suggested, the 
Canyon is of comparatively recent origin. It was 
probably started in the last period of Tertiary times 
— that is, the Pliocene — or perhaps even as late as 
Quaternary times. It lacks the smoothness that 
comes with age. Erosion and corrasion — the me- 
chanical wear by friction and the chemical wear 
through solution — ^have flattened the bed of the 
Hudson and washed down its walls into rolling slopes, 
but the Colorado is still canyon bound, hanging in 
the rock, cutting down to sea-level (Plate 19). And 



130 THE GRAND CANYON 

its water is still running red with oxides of iron and 
copper, keeping pace with those torrential streams 

" Whose foam is amber and their gravel gold." 

It is this newness, with its sharpness of tooth and 
claw, that adds greatly to the River's savage mien. 

And to its loneliness. From its rise in the Wind 
River Mountains of Wyoming to its debouchment 
in the Gulf of California it is a lonely River. There 
is no city at its source, nor at its mouth, nor yet 
again along its length. Yuma and its kind, perched 
on a bench in the desert, seem as much out of place 
as might a town in the depths of the Canyon itself. 
The River knows no cities. For seven hundred 
miles it is not bridged nor navigated nor mill- 
streamed nor utilized by mankind. It goes its 
lonely way. 

The utilitarians look at it and perhaps wonder 
how they can harness it, make it turn wheels, 
generate electricity, or irrigate the earth. It now 
serves no "purpose" and is quite "useless" — use- 
less to man, who still cherishes the idea that the 
world was made exclusively for him. But Nature 
works alike for the animate and the inanimate. 
The Colorado is one of her best cutting instruments. 
She is using the River to grind and carry away the 
rock of the Plateau Country. She is laying it down 
in beds of sand and silt in the Gulf of California, 
and in the fulness of time she will heave it up into 



THE COLORADO 131 



a new plateau for use in a new world era. Is that 
not more important than being a present trunk 
sewer for foul cities, a fetch and carry for mere 
man? 

The River is only one of the many agencies of 
the great law of change — change whereby the world 
is renewed and kept virile and living. It is an ele- 
mental force and perhaps too remote from human 
endeavor to be rightly comprehended. We test it 
by intellectual or economic standards and find it 
a great unconformity, an anomaly, an extravagance 
— something incomprehensible. We try to utilize 
it but it defies us. We think to make application 
of it in art and literature, but it does not respond. 
It is not classic, romantic, realistic, or cubistic. We 
can do little with it. 

All the poems and purple patches of prose written 
about it are but so many elongated exclamations. 
The only poem that, in measure, suggests the spirit 
of it was written a hundred years ago by one who 
probably never so much as heard of the Canyon; 

" In Xanadu did Kubia Khan 
A stately pleasure dome decree 
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran 
Through caverns measureless to man 
Down to a sunless sea. 

4: H: H: 4: 4: 4e 

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, 
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, 



132 THE GRAND CANYON 

A mighty fountain momently was forced, 
Amid whose swift half -intermitted bm*st 
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, 
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail; 
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever 
It flung up momently the sacred river." 

Something of the power, the remoteness, the 
weirdness of the Colorado are unconsciously hinted 
at in Coleridge's poem, but no more. It is not 
realization — ^not the final truth. In spite of every 
suggestion, explanation, and representation we still 
grope along the twisted rocks of the Inner Gorge in 
amazement. Smaller things may distract our atten- 
tion for the moment — a barrel-shaped bisnaga 
growing out of a crack in the rose granite, the pow- 
dered sands in a cove water-waved in astonishing 
curves, a lone kingfisher sitting on a rock survey- 
ing the thick stream where he could not see a fish 
if one were there — ^but we keep coming back from 
the incidental to the fundamental. The purple 
walls draw us, the racing River keeps roaring a 
fanfare in our ears. Just a little of the fear and the 
impulse that we first experienced at the Rim are 
with us. We are not accustomed to this clash of 
elements. Wind and storm and lightning are an 
old story, but the mad plunge of a canyoned river 
is something unique. 

Everything here in this strange river-valley is 



THE COLORADO 133 



novel in experience and, as a result, stimulating to 
the imagination. One is continually with nerves 
on edge, with sensibilities stirred by sensations. 
It is not a restful place, for all that Nature's repose 
is so supreme. Least restful of all places is this 
Inner Canyon where the River runs and the Plu- 
tonic walls rise into sharp edges and needles. In 
vain the eye seeks the long, flowing line that rests 
it. In its place you have the broken and the angle 
line, the teeth of the rip-saw, the ragged spine. 

Presently you leave them and go back to the 
slopes under the Red Wall. It is a relief to get 
away from the shock of sound and the giddy slip 
of the water. Even one's amazement must have a 
rest. 



CHAPTER XI 
NIGHT IN THE CANYON 

The traveller who delights In the panorama, the 
long-distance view, may be disappointed in the 
Canyon depths. Descending any one of the trails 
is very like going down into a narrow Alpine valley, 
say at the Maloja, or Lauterbrunnen. The field of 
vision at once begins to lose in breadth, width, and 
height. The distance across is from cliff to cliff, 
the Rim becomes the horizon circle, and the great 
vault of the sky shrinks to a blue roof upheld by 
walls. More astonishing than anything else is 
this apparent sinking of the sky. It seems to drop 
into the flutings of the Kaibab and stretch across 
from north to south. The blue is, of course, merely 
the coloring of a deep bank of air, but perhaps we 
fail to reckon with the air following us down into 
the Canyon. 

All this is apparent from the Tonto slopes, but 
it becomes more emphasized as you descend into 
the Inner Canyon or Granite Gorge. You are then 
hedged in by dark walls on the sides, with a reddish- 
yellow strip of river below and a corresponding 
blue strip of sky above. You are in a box — a box 

134 



NIGHT IN THE CANYON 135 

canyon. The light there is not wanting in illumina- 
tion, but its effect is perhaps lessened by much 
shadow from the high walls. "The gloom of the 
gorge/' however, is a rather exaggerated phrase. 
With certain portions of the inner walls there may be 
the darkening that one sees in the narrow canyon 
street but no "gloom" — at least not in the day- 
time. 

At dusk it is different. The gorge banks full of 
purple and violet shadow as soon as the sun has gone 
down, and when night has set in it becomes densely 
dark, fathomless, formless. The only light comes 
from the sky overhead — the ribbon of sky that now 
takes on a night blue and is spangled with stars. 
The stars seem near, and the illusion of their near- 
ness is helped on, perhaps, by their being seen at 
dusk from the gorge just a little before they are seen 
at the Rim. Stars from the bottom of a well and 
from the bottom of the Inner Canyon have a similar 
appearance. They are not visible from either place 
at noonday, but at dusk the well and the wall cut 
off the side-lights and thus make visibility greater 
overhead. 

The Inner Canyon is hardly the place for full- 
light effects. The Tonto slopes that offer some little 
perspective are better, and Hermit Camp on the 
Tonto is a comfortable quarter from which to study 
the play of light at any and all hours. The study 



136 THE GRAND CANYOIS" 

calls for an almost continuous looking up. The 
walls are the places where sun and shadow fall, 
where twilight fades and moonlight gathers. And 
walls are all around you at the camp. They are 
continually responding to different phases of light, 
but the western light at sunset is about the only one 
that catches the average visitor's eye. 

At this hour the high buttes across the River 
from Hermit (Plate 21) often appear with almost 
iridescent surfaces. The westering sun throws 
down and along the Canyon its reddened beams, 
striking the tops of the buttes and turning them into 
hues of gold, of rose, of lilac, of violet. The most 
unbelievable tones and shades are then registered 
on these barren rocks. The Red Wall and the 
Supai are the first to kindle, and frequently they are 
aglow with intense reds before six o'clock. Natu- 
rally they are the first to lose the light and settle 
into gloom, while above them the Coconino and the 
Kaibab are still flushed with rose and pink. After 
the sun has gone down the hot twilight sky illumines 
these upper strata with golden or reddish or some- 
times violet light. They are then at their height in 
quality of hue. 

But the lower bases in the dusk are very impres- 
sive even when indefinite. And they are seen on 
our side of the River as well as elsewhere. The 
Lookout (Plate 22) directly back of Hermit Camp 



NIGHT IN THE CANYON 137 

shows them to advantage. At first the contours 
and outlines of the high point, seen against the 
bright upper sky, are clean-cut. The prow rides 
into the blue with every niche along its edge, every 
pinyon and maguey growing on its top, every field 
of lichens on its upper walls, showing distinctly. 
Gradually the dusk drifts in and around the bottom 
platforms, it creeps up the huge western wall, the 
light slowly recedes before it. The base begins to 
fade, the top begins to loom, and presently the 
whole structure shifts into a color mystery half lost 
in shadow. The dramatic and the spectacular 
mingle with the picturesque to make an astonishing 
picture. 

The same effect shows upon the great walls un- 
derlying Pima Point (Plate 16). The bases become 
muffled in pinkish purple and the tops seem to 
drift against the blue as surfaces of reddish orange. 
Even the near Red Wall begins to develop some 
imrealities. The lighter portions sink back from 
the surface; they are the places where rock has re- 
cently fallen away. The darker and older parts of 
the surface come forward with their field of lichens 
and look like torn fragments of velvet tapestry. 
The Tonto platforms beneath, still holding their 
light and their Nile-green color, offer support, con- 
trast, and harmony to the Red Wall. But pres- 
ently everything begins to lose edge and accent. 



138 THE GRAND CANYON 

And yet you do not doubt the still tremendous 
strength and lift of the Red Wall. It stands there 
like the underpinning of Creation. Lights and 
colors shift and atmospheres change as skies lighten 
and darken but the Red Wall holds firm. 

" Ten thousand years have come and gone 
It has not split or crumbled yet 
It still turns rose-red in the dawn 
Turns gold-red when the sun has set 
Ten thousand more may find it there 
Still standing in the purple air." 

Ten thousand years! A mere group of ciphers in 
geological time! Yet how strange the isolated 
thought that during all those years that have crept 
in and crept out the Red Wall has stood there re- 
flecting the flush of morning as the glow of evening, 
stood there in silence, without noticeable change, 
immutable as the globe itself ! And high above it, 
like a signal-tower of the sky, Pima Point flashing 
in with sunrise gold and flashing out with sunset 
orange! A mere beam of light coming with no 
sound and going with no stain for ten thousand 
years ! How strange the thought that, superficially 
considered, these wondrous walls should play no 
other part than reflecting the sun's splendor! 
Again the feeling of the theatre comes back. These 
changes of light and color are the mere shiftings of 



NIGHT IN THE CANYON 139 

Nature's footlights. Ah ! but the play is staged for 
eternity ! And it was from the beginning. 

As the dusk comes on all the walls lose their form 
and structure; the fissures, pinnacles, and amphi- 
theatres blur out; the surfaces flatten and merge 
into one dull face that lifts in a fluted edge against 
the still-lighted sky. Distance goes out, too. In a 
short time the walls to the west of Hermit Camp 
are two miles away or two hundred yards; they are 
a thousand or a hundred feet high. You cannot 
say. The dusk makes mere blurs of them — indefi- 
nite masses of dark in the half-dark. They bulk or 
recede or change in tone with the shifting light of 
the upper sky. A purple air veils everything, and 
through it one sees, on the high points, spots or 
bosses of color that still glow as though some latent 
fire were beneath them. 

The same fading away in drifts of colored air goes 
on among the buttes across the River. The little 
canyons lying in between fill with gloom, the 
Tonto slopes shift into golden grays, the Red Wall 
bases become uncertain in form, the Coconino cap- 
stones look like spots of old ivory. Then the whole 
panorama flattens and becomes merely a purple 
blur with perhaps some porcelain-like glow from a 
high point of rock that still records the vanish- 
ing light. Mystery — a blue-and-purple mystery — 
spreads and enwraps the scene. 



140 THE GRAND CANYON 

Night comes down upon the slopes and platforms 
and one by one the stars shine forth and dot the 
roof overhead. Fleecy clouds of the cirrus, thou- 
sands of feet in the sky, glow with the light shot up 
from below the western verge. Bats flutter across 
the stars, a poor-will far up the creek-bed begins 
calling, a coyote whines from a distant slope, crickets 
chirp in the grass of the garden near the camp. 
Otherwise there is silence — a silence that the low 
hum of the distant River emphasizes •rather than 
destroys. 

Usually at this hour there is some sigh or moan 
of the winds along the walls. At sundown, with the 
decrease of radiation, the heat in the Canyon rises 
up and out, while the cold air from the upper pla- 
teaus draws down the lateral canyons to take its 
place. An evening wind is thus set in motion that 
moves around the walls and amphitheatres with a 
sigh and, in times of storm, with a moan or shriek. 
You do not hear these sounds at such places as 
Hermit Camp, but up under the Red Wall they are 
often very pronounced. At times they are a bit 
imcanny and suggestive of the ghostly. 

Moonlight in the great depth is perhaps something 
of a disappointment. The Canyon is a huge rack 
of form, a welter of color; and moonlight simply 
softens and subdues it, blurring its splendor and 
weakening its force. Especially is this true when 




From- a photograph, copyrighted "by Fred Harvey. 

Plate 22. THE LOOKOUT. 

Base of Pima Point left, Lookout centre, Hermit Camp below, dry wash 
behind camp, false sage in foreground. 



NIGHT IN THE CANYON 141 

the moon is full and its rise takes place before the 
light has entirely gone out of the sunset west. 
The two lights then blend to produce a tonal effect 
— an effect that destroys accent, contour, and bulk 
by flooding everything with a warm silver glow. 
This is very noticeable looking down upon the 
Tonto platforms. As intimated some pages back, 
they appear cloud-like, almost phosphorescent, as 
though some internal light were shining from them. 
This peculiar luminosity of the Tonto, with the un- 
certain shadows of the walls, make even a familiar 
locality look strange. You grope for well-known 
points and get only mysterious lights, odd protru- 
sions or recessions of form, unfathomable depths of 
gloom. 

As the lignt in the west dies out the moonlight 
grows in intensity, becomes more luminous, produces 
better-defined forms. The eastern and southern 
walls under the Rim cast great fields of shadow into 
the Canyon, and where the shadow meets the full 
light shining on the lower slopes the edge is clear- 
cut — cut sharp. Colors are very pale and look 
bleached out. The greens of the pinyons are dull 
olive green, the reds of the Supai are pale pink, the 
yellows of the Kaibab are white. 

When the moon is high in the heavens and the 
shadows have receded to a great extent, the walls 
take on a silvery or violet tone warmed by under- 



142 THE GRAND CANYON 



lying pinks and reds. Certain points or knobs of 
smooth rock become spots of high light and great 
fields of half-light glow with a dull opalescence. 
The fire-rocks in the Inner Gorge occasionally throw 
back shadowy glintings from mica ledges — as shad- 
owy as the lights seen in a dark mirror — ^but usu- 
ally these walls remain neutral and forbidding. 

The River running between the walls is quite as 
unresponsive. Sometimes there is the flicker of 
wave foam, but usually the surface is lightless. 
An angel's pathway and its broken reflection, flash- 
ing like a golden goblet sinking into the sea, are 
things that do not appear. The water is too turbid 
for bright reflection, too turbulent for pathways of 
light, too tossing for angel footfalls. 

These dark walls and this whipsaw River with 
its metallic surge of sound seem to have little affinity 
with moonlight — moonlight that should be seen 
beside still waters with summer-night silences. 
Again we fling back to a former conclusion that ro- 
mance and poetry are not fitted for the Canyon. 
It is too big, too vast a background, for song or fic- 
tion. The tradition here is of the rocks, not of the 
race — of the earliest stages of creation, not of the 
sentiment of a later life. 

On moonless nights the Canyon depth is only a 
gloom. There may be a purple sky with stars over- 
head, but it can be seen quite as well from El Tovar 



NIGHT IN THE CANYON 143 

as from Hermit Camp. Mere night in the Canyon 
is not especially interesting. In fact, one might 
say without extravagance that the glory of the 
Canyon sets with the sun. It needs full light and 
clear vision rather than half-light and mystery. 



CHAPTER XII 
RIM VIEWS 

The lower platforms with the Granite Gorge and 
the River may prove interesting playgrounds for 
a few hours, but as the days pass by you begin to 
cast longing eyes at the Rim. You miss the horizon 
line, the lift of the sky, the broad expanse of light. 
After all, the depth is something of a pit, a shut-in 
abnormal valley at the least. In the summer it is 
very hot down there, while up on the Rim one has 
pleasant memories of night winds blowing through 
the pinyons and cedars. Besides, El Tovar has its 
attractions. 

Indeed, the hotel is far too beguiling. From that 
comfortable quarter you look out and perhaps 
indolently come to the conclusion that you are see- 
ing the whole Canyon. Nine people out of ten rest 
content with that view and that conclusion. They 
get no farther than the benches along the Rim. 
There they watch trail parties on Bright Angel, or 
study the houses and trees below them at Indian 
Garden, or locate buttes across the River with the 
aid of a section of pipe hung on a swivel. Perhaps 
the dessert end of dinner is curtailed to see a sun- 

144 



EIM VIEWS 145 



set effect on the north walls, and when the evening 
train goes out they go with it, rather glad that they 
came, and quite satisfied perhaps that they have 
"seen'* the Canyon. What a mistake ! 

The view at El Tovar is limited. The hotel site 
was not chosen for its view but for its railway facili- 
ties, and the hotel itself was perhaps more of a hap- 
pening than a planning. Look about you from 
where you stand and you will see on your left 
Maricopa Point, and far on your right Yavapai 
Point. You are in a pocket between these points 
and cannot see up or down the Canyon. Moreover, 
the pocket is in a swale and it is not possible to see 
over the ridge of either Maricopa or Yavapai. In 
the summer neither sunrise nor sunset (on the hori- 
zon) is visible from the hotel. You see it merely in 
the upper sky and as reflected from the northern 
walls and buttes. The view straight ahead is yours 
and little more. 

That is not to say the view ahead is hardly worth 
while. One gets depth and plunge at El Tovar. 
And also width. It is the widest part of the Can- 
yon — eight miles from where you stand to the edge 
of the Kaibab Plateau, twelve miles or thereabouts 
to the head of Bright Angel Canyon on the north 
side. This gives something of a sweep; enough at 
least to show many upright walls, dozens of isolated 
buttes, and scores of lateral canyons (Plate 2). 



146 THE GRAND CANYON 

There is hardly any view, however limited, at the 
Canyon that does not reveal the grandly picturesque. 

Practically all the face-walls are to be seen from 
the hotel terrace, though not at their best. Under 
Maricopa Point at the left are the cliffs of the Kai- 
bab and below them come the sheer wall of the 
Coconino and the steps and serpentines of the Supai 
(Plate 1). Beneath these follows the Red Wall, 
which can be seen to the left and the right of Bright 
Angel Trail. There are arenas in it that from El 
Tovar are very marked in curvature because seen at 
a distance and with some perspective effect (Plate 
3). Yet the distance itself deceives. The arenas 
are much larger than you imagine. Across the 
River, in the bases of the great buttes, there are 
even larger arenas and of more striking regularity of 
form. 

Over the saddle between the Battleship and Mari- 
copa Point there is an unpretentious ending of a 
promontory called Dana Butte, to which attention 
has already been called (Plate 1). It is peculiarly 
charming in form and color, especially in the eve- 
ning light. Its form is enhanced by a pointed knob 
of red Supai shale at the top. The upper layers of 
Coconino and Kaibab were washed and worn 
from it centuries ago, and nothing now of the 
thousand feet of Supai remains save this small 
knob. Directly under the knob you can see a 



RIM VIEWS 147 



red stain on the face-wall, while at either side 
merely a dull salmon shows. The salmon at twi- 
light shifts and passes into many odd hues and, in 
conjunction with a surrounding of Tonto greens, 
forms as fine a gamut of low-toned colors as you 
will find anywhere in the Canyon. 

The Tonto platforms at twilight, on both sides 
of the River, are almost always exquisite in pale 
tones of green, gold, saffron, or even rose and 
lilac. Across from Dana Butte they spread out 
in beautiful slopes and terraces. Stream-beds that 
drain Osiris, Shiva, and other buttes wind in and 
around just there, and the green and yellow of the 
shales lend note and accent. These buttes and 
terraces should be watched at sunrise and sunset 
for their subtle color-changes. For instance, just 
after the sun has gone down, drifts of colored air 
seem to cut off the bases of Shiva and Isis, the reds 
of the upper structure become coral red, and the 
Coconino caps glow like translucent porphyry. 
The buttes themselves become phantom-like and 
half-transparent. In contrast to this color-scheme, 
if you will look far to the right at Zoroaster and 
Brahma, you will find a different angle of light has 
flushed them with a brilliant Indian red. 

The hotel bench is also an excellent place from 
which to see clouds, mist, and rain. The clouds are 
often veiled, fringed, plumed, winged, but more 



148 THE GKAND CANYON 

often merely torn and scattered. They are not 
only above but frequently below the Rim (Plate 
27). A cold rain falling into the Canyon, that has 
been blazing in the sun all day, means that a great 
deal of vapor begins to rise in warm currents from 
the depths. As soon as these warm currents reach 
the Rim they are struck by a colder air and con- 
densed into cloud. Or the cold air may draw down 
into the depth and create clouds around and under 
the walls. One can see them forming, breaking, 
dissolving, with great distinctness from the Rim. 
Sometimes they seem to boil up from below and fill 
the whole Canyon; then they dissipate, clear away, 
and, as dusk comes down, grow pale blue, with the 
depths below them a dark ultramarine. Very 
forceful are these drifting patterns of blue and white 
seen against the dark depth, and vastly more beauti- 
ful than the fogs which merely bank the Canyon full 
and obliterate forms and colors of all sorts (Plate 28), 
While the outlook from El Tovar is not to be 
depreciated, the view from Hopi Point, two miles 
to the west, is more imposing. Hopi and Mari- 
copa are two spurs that project from one promon- 
tory, and perhaps Hopi gives the wider angle of 
vision. Both are spectacular. You look east, 
west, north, across miles of buttes and promon- 
tories. Those who are interested in identifying the 
buttes by name can here make out, to the west 



RIM VIEWS 149 



(Plate 23), the cap of Osiris; to the right of it 
Dragonhead, Shiva, and Isis; and around to the 
north Cheops and Buddha. To the east of Bright 
Angel Canyon are Deva, Brahma, Zoroaster, Wal- 
halla Plateau, and Wotan's Throne; on the far 
North Rim is Cape Final, and in the eastern dis- 
tance are the Palisades lying in front of the Painted 
Desert. 

It is a wonderful view but not very intimate in 
any part except in the near portions under you 
such as the little Horn Creek, the Dana Butte, the 
great arenas in the Red Wall, a small section of the 
Colorado, and the dry Trinity Creek across the 
River (Plate 8). The view is too distant, too large, 
for intimacy; but then that is the quality of the 
whole Canyon. The great display of form, the 
mere bigness of it, have much to do with the feeling 
of exaltation that almost every visitor here knows. 
Mass, space, and sweep are elements of the sublime. 

Something of sublimity, too, is revealed by the re- 
peated masses of color — the great fields of it spread 
under the blue dome of sky. At first one thinks 
the red of the Supai the prevailing tone, but later 
on the Nile greens of the Tonto seem more potent 
and the mauves and violets of the Granite Gorge 
more enthralling. Of course none of these color- 
tones is so remarkable in local hue as in what it will 
echo or reflect under different lights. Light is the 



150 THE GRAND CANYON 

great color-maker and nowhere works more wonder- 
fully than on these Canyon walls. Add to this 
the binding medium of air — an air that shifts from 
gas-blue to rose, lilac, and purple — ^and you have a 
color display that may well produce aesthetic rap- 
ture. 

The Rim Road runs west from Hopi Point around 
by the Inferno (that being the name for the basin 
that sets back and in just here) to Mohave Point. 
This is another point of observation not essentially 
different from Hopi, though each point at the 
Canyon has its variation from the type and possesses 
its own local features. At Mohave, for example, 
your distance view has not materially changed 
but you have to the east the steep walls of the 
Kaibab and Coconino under Hopi, and to the west 
a pitch downward into Monument Creek and its 
upper basin or watershed, known as the Abyss. 
The view of the red walls of the Abyss is decidedly 
impressive. The proportions are not only vast but 
the walls are graceful in a large monumental way — 
that is, they bend in and out and run on in great 
waves that flow but do not break. Pima Point is, 
however, the better outlook because the walls under 
the Mohave side, looking across the Abyss to the 
east, are more abrupt in lift and serpentine in flow. 
Besides, their color under morning shadow is as- 
tounding. The brilliancy of this color is partly 



RIM VIEWS 151 



caused by reflection from the opposing walls in 
sunlight. 

The Rim Road continues around to Pima. This 
point is the projecting wedge between Hermit and 
Monument Creeks. It runs far out into the Can- 
yon and the distance views from it are magnificent 
(Plate 24). To the west are Cocopah and Havasupai 
Points; directly over the mouth of Hermit Creek is 
Point Sublime; and the famous temples and towers 
of the gods, whose names we ignorantly worship, 
are to be seen from almost every angle. The water- 
worn Canyon stretches on unendingly, the far ring 
of the horizon sweeps above and around it in a 
tremendous circle, beneath the sunset are the peaks 
of the Uinkaret Range, and to the southeast spreads 
the Coconino Plateau. What wonderful distances ! 

The Hermit Creek Trail leads down the west 
side of Pima, and Hermit Camp is almost under its 
point. By looking down you can see the trail 
where it emerges on the Tonto from under Cathedral 
Stairs. Cope Butte projects just there, being in 
kind a thin knife-blade under-prow of Pima Point. 
The Granite Gorge with its dark rocks is just be- 
yond, and quite a section of the River is seen in its 
depth. 

The Abyss is about as noble in enclosing walls 
as anything seen at the Canyon; and Pima Point, 
with Hermit Basin on its left and Monument Basin 



152 THE GRAND CANYON 

on its right, is the most effective point west of El 
Tovar, barring Havasupai. From it one sees ex- 
cellent illustrations of Canyon carving and plateau 
erosioUc It is all about you. The point itself is 
little more than a left-over projecting cape. Even- 
tually it will be cut through at the back and become 
an island — a butte. The drainage streams across 
the River should be noticed just here for the way 
they have broken through the backs of the Tonto 
platforms. 

The climax of all western views is undoubtedly 
that from Havasupai. A wood road runs out to 
the point, but it is not well travelled, and the point 
itself is little visited. It is thirty miles from El 
Tovar and the way thither is not in good repute 
with automobilists. Bass Camp is two miles west 
of it, and from there the traveller reaches Hava- 
supai by a faint Rim trail, or he can make a short 
cut through the woods by Fossil Mountain. The 
point is spur-shaped and (from the end) very steep 
in descent. There are swift downward flights that 
may be thought disturbing. The drop to the River 
in a mile and a half is four thousand Gye hundred 
feet — one of the most abrupt descents anywhere in 
the Grand Canyon. At the left, under Fossil 
Mountain (a mountain apparently cut in two and 
sometimes called Split Mountain), there are tre- 
mendous walls — sandstone and red-shale walls — 




From a photogravh by F. A. Lathe, copyrighted by the Atchison, Topeka and 
Santa Fe Railroad. 

Plate 24. PIMA POINT, LOOKING WEST. 

The cutting of streams shown on walls of point in left foreground. 



RIM VIEWS 153 



that are amazing in their lift, their depth, and above 
all in their mass. Looking down from them might 
well make one dizzy, for here is the unmistakable 
precipice. But the traveller is not supposed to go 
over there on an idle quest of precipices. 

Havasupai is the last of the very high points, for 
the Canyon walls begin to break down just here. 
The Grand Scenic Divide is to the left, under the 
foot of Havasupai, and that is the division line be- 
tween the Grand Canyon proper and the flatter 
continuation down to the Grand Wash. The change, 
as already premised, means steeper palisaded walls, 
fewer isolated buttes, fewer side-canyons, and larger, 
more extensive promontories and platforms that 
push out in the Canyon and then descend in one 
or two swift drops to the River. The drops are 
often a thousand or more feet. Mt. Huethewali, 
around to the left, is practically the last of the 
Canyon buttes as the Scenic Divide is the begin- 
ning of the long, flat promontories. The Colorado 
here runs straight west, turns sharply to the south, 
and then doubles back to the north. 

Perhaps the flattening down of the Canyon here 
is at the expense of grandeur, but to make up for it 
there is an increase in the picturesque. The ter- 
rain has a simpler surface. The lines are longer 
and more continuous, the forms are more massive, 
the shadows broader, the colors in larger fields, the 



154 THE GRAND CANYON 

light greater in its spread. And what a superb 
sweep now in the horizon ring ! The circle is quite 
complete, and not the least interesting segment of it 
lies over to the west against the sky — the Uinkaret 
Range. That Range, like almost everything in the 
Plateau Country, is more or less odd and strange 
when seen close to view. It is punctured every- 
where with volcanic craters and covered with sheets 
of lava — a base of sandstone and shale blanketed 
with obsidian. But seen from Havasupai, seen 
as a mere decorative pattern, how beautifully the 
blue ridge stretches against the Great Blue and 
rims the sunset west ! 

Beneath Havasupai the Tonto spreads out and 
down in wave-like terraces, dry washes are between 
the slopes, and creek-beds cut through everywhere 
to the River. The Colorado itself is seen, but its 
enclosing purple walls are not so lofty as at Bright 
Angel, though its ribbons of rose granite still wave 
serpent-like. The Archaean is beginning to go out 
here, and farther on disappears entirely. On the 
north side of the River are buttes apparently set 
on star-shaped bases. Dox Castle, with a Coco- 
nino fragment on its top, lies almost directly north 
of you, and beyond it, a little to the right, is Holy 
Grail Temple, with King Arthur and Guinevere 
Castles. Straight to the east across Sagittarius 
Ridge is Point Sublime, which Captain Dutton 



KIM VIEWS 155 



thought was the climax of all Canyon views. The 
long lines of Powell Plateau and the steep jut-out 
of Ives, Wheeler, and Button Points to the north- 
west are not less grand. Every point here is sublime. 
And everything in the sunset glow is wonderful. 
An orange horizon, above it a green sky running 
into lilac, and all the shadows in the Canyon pitched 
in violet and purple ! What a glory of color ! 

Sixty or more miles to the east you can see, 
against the horizon, Cape Final, and opposite to 
it on the South Rim is Desert View. That is the 
beginning, as this is the ending, of the Grand Can- 
yon proper. Both extremes sink down a little 
through dips in the strata and have not the full 
height of Hopi and Grand View, but perhaps they 
have more color-splendor. Down at the eastern 
end, stretching away for many miles, spreads the 
Painted Desert. The name suggests an attempt to 
describe its color, but the name is wanting in 
imagination. It fails to create an image of the 
reality. But, then, all words fail with the Painted 
Desert. 



CHAPTER XIII 
GRAND AND DESERT VIEW 

Moving east along the Rim from El Tovar brings 
one, in half an hour, to Yavapai Point — the other 
horn of the hotel crescent. It is almost directly 
opposite the Bright Angel Canyon, and from it 
one has an excellent view of the great buttes across 
the River (Plate 12). You can also see down the 
Grand Canyon to the west as far as Powell Plateau 
and to the east as far as Comanche Point. It is a 
fair field for dawn and twilight effects. Yavapai 
is quite frequently resorted to at evening (Plate 27). 
The sunsets from there are often magnificent. 

From this point two flashes of the River are seen 
— neither of them extended or inspiring. Pipe 
Creek is in the lateral canyon at the right, while to 
the left one sees the Red Wall under the Battleship 
with its huge amphitheatres. Bright Angel Trail, 
in its lower reaches, is beneath the toe of Yavapai; 
but that ephemeral line cut by mule-hoofs should 
not absorb attention to the neglect of the great 
lines in these walls and slopes cut by water through 
the centuries. Nature is always the dominant pres- 
ence here. 

156 



GRAND AND DESERT VIEW 157 

To your right, looking southeast, is Yaki Point, 
and below it the promontory known as O'Neill 
Butte; but you must follow the Rim two hundred 
yards beyond the sign "Yavapai Point" to gain 
this view. The trail to Yaki runs by the Rim 
around from Yavapai. It is a winding way leading 
through a burned section, and in the summer months 
is interesting because of the wild flowers growing 
along it. At the head of the side-canyon between 
the two points, on the Kaibab taluses, is a small 
grove of Douglas spruce and white silver fir — several 
hundred of them standing together under the Rim, 
their dark greens and pointed tops making a won- 
derful wild-wood tapestry. How still they stand! 
When you begin to lose interest in the wear-down 
and wear-out of the Canyon, you can come back 
to this grove under the Rim and feel that all is not 
destruction, that here Nature is building up rather 
than dragging down. There is no riverine roar 
about it. The growth goes on silently and serenely 
through the years. What a beautiful growth! 
You will not find anything more attractive at the 
Canyon than these still and lonely trees. 

Yaki Point (the original name, O'Neill, survives 
only in the butte that runs off from the point) pre- 
sents substantially the same vistas up and down the 
Canyon, the same buttes and promontories across 
the River, as Yavapai (Plate 25). You are only 



158 THE GRAND CANYON 

two miles farther east in an air line. Perhaps you 
get a closer view of such huge sections as Walhalla 
Plateau and Wotan^s Throne, or of such vast de- 
pressions as the Ottoman Amphitheatre, or see in 
clearer outlines Comanche Point and the Painted 
Desert, whither we are tending. Directly across 
the River is Zoroaster Temple, which should be 
looked at again for the enormous arenas in its Red 
Wall and the wash-down of streams around and 
about it. And notice the Tonto platforms on 
both sides of the River. How beautifully they run 
on in great waves and swells ! How supremely true 
and right in line these sculptured waves of the lower 
terraces ! 

If you continue by the Rim to the east you circle 
the basin between Yaki and Shoshone (Inspiration) 
Points, and everywhere along the way the view is 
not only open but grandly beautiful. Even look- 
ing into the lateral canyon that lies between the two 
points shows slopes and platforms that are supremely 
graceful. Shoshone Point when reached proves to 
be arrow-headed, sharp-pointed, somewhat precipi- 
tous on the sides. The look to the west from there 
is interrupted by Yaki Point, but the look to the 
east is open. Shoshone is one of the fine view-points 
at the Canyon, quite as fine as Grand View, but less 
accessible. It is about seven miles from El Tovar 
by a rather poor trail. 



GRAND AND DESERT VIEW 159 

Seven or eight miles farther to the east and you 
arrive at Grand View — the one-time travel-centre at 
the Canyon, and still one of the best places for sight- 
seeing. Back from Grand View Point a mile or more 
there is the remainder of a hotel and some small cab- 
ins. The place was a lively settlement when copper 
was king in the Canyon and relays of burros were 
bringing the metal up to the Rim. But the copper 
king died early, the trail is now abandoned, and a 
few cast-off burros, roaming the lower slopes, re- 
main to bray the tale of failure. Grand View is no 
longer a copper camp, but it has lost nothing of pic- 
turesqueness by the passing of the miner. 

The western yellow pines grow everywhere about 
the old hotel, and their reddish-cinnamon trunks 
often frame up picturesque views of the Canyon, 
enhancing it perhaps by limiting its scope. These 
pines extend out upon Grand View Point, and with 
them go small groves of pinyons, cedars, oaks, and 
thickets of cliff-rose. Vegetation seems more abun- 
dant here than elsewhere, and, even when you come 
to the extreme point, there are trees about you. But 
they do not shut out the view in any way. That 
view is really stupendous. The altitude is seven 
thousand five hundred feet, which means that you 
are on a high point of the Canyon Rim. The Can- 
yon itself is wide here and the circle of vision corre- 
spondingly great. The view is much too compre- 



160 THE GBAND CANYON 



hensive for the five-minute tourist who gazes while 
his car hums and his chauffeur smokes a cigarette. 

If you look around the horizon you will once 
more find yourself in the centre of a great stone 
circle. Only at your back does the fringe of pines 
break in upon the ring. Across the River from you 
the buttes pile up enormously. Just over the 
green-tinged ridge beneath the point is a square 
butte with two Coconino outcrops upon its sum- 
mit. In the pseudo-poetic nomenclature of the 
Canyon maps this is known as Angels Gate. Farther 
around to the right is the lofty Vishnu capped with 
a Kaibab fragment which lifts higher than the 
point upon which you stand. Between the two is 
Wotan's Throne, two hundred feet higher than 
Grand View Point, and growing on its flat top the 
same pinyons and junipers that flourish along the 
Rim. It is a huge detachment from the northern 
plateau still standing intact, and showing all the 
Canyon strata in regular order. There is no better 
view of it than from this point. 

A little farther to the right, on the North Rim, 
one can see the apparent end of the high Kaibab 
Plateau in what is called Cape Final. It is, of 
course, merely a point on the north wall thrown 
into sky relief by our position. Under it, but ap- 
parently to the right of it, is a lantern-topped butte 
called Jupiter Temple. Still farther to the right 



GRAND AND DESERT VIEW 161 

one sees the Palisades, and beyond these the long 
reach of the Painted Desert (Plate 26). Only a 
glimpse of it is given here, but that glimpse is sug- 
gestive of rose and gold under strong sunlight. It 
lies beside the Canyon, and in kind is just as mar- 
vellous and surprising as any part of the Plateau 
Country. 

Continuing around the horizon to the right you 
see Comanche Point, on your side of the River; and 
then Desert View with Lincoln, Zuni, and Moran 
Points. This brings you back almost to Coronado 
Butte (formerly Ayer Butte) and Grand View. All 
these points are merely sharp spurs or projections 
in the South Rim from which different outlooks are 
obtainable. Above them, stretching for miles, you 
can see the reach of the Tusayan Forest, and far 
to the south are the blue bases and snowy tops of the 
San Francisco Mountains. 

The look to the west from Grand View is less open 
because Shoshone Point and some high ridges lie 
in the way. That does not, of course, interfere with 
the view to the great buttes lying to the right 
and left of Bright Angel Canyon, nor the far view 
across the Hindu Amphitheatre to Point Sublime. 
The full western reach of the Canyon is perhaps 
best seen from Desert View; but at Grand View 
there are enough marvels for any one on a summer's 
afternoon. 



162 THE GEAND CANYON 

One never ceases to marvel, for instance, over the 
sweeping jade-green terraces, or the lift and strength 
of the exposed cliffs. The Rim here is deeply 
notched by cut-back canyons that show magnificent 
walls. These latter always impress us with their 
bulk and we think of their endurance as almost 
everlasting. Yet the processes of breakdown are 
here. They are apparent in the mass extending 
out from the point of Grand View. It was orig- 
inally part of the point but has collapsed and crum- 
bled to its present condition. The splintered wall 
a little to the right, where the trail runs down to 
the River, again testifies to destructive processes 
that are slowly wrecking the outstanding promon- 
tories. Below is Horseshoe Mesa, where the break- 
down has been more complete. At one time, no 
doubt, Grand View Point extended out and over 
this mesa, and the River ran only a few hundred 
feet below it. The Gorge was then perhaps cut only 
through the Kaibab sandstone, and the Archsean 
rocks were G.Ye thousand feet below, untouched and 
undiscovered. But that was ages and ages ago — 
so many that even geologists can merely guess at 
them. 

Destruction is at the right of Grand View, too. 
There are firm walls in the little canyon that heads 
up toward the old hotel, but across this canyon you 
can see a broken butte or promontory, known as 



GEAND AND DESERT VIEW 163 

Three Castles, that seems to have collapsed at its 
toe, sagged down several hundred feet. For all the 
massive underlying beds there has probably been 
some break in the strata just here — a break caused 
by pressure or subsidence. The promontory may 
have an unusual geological history, though that is 
not probable. If you were over there and looking this 
way, toward Grand View, you would see that this 
point, too, sags down at the end. There is minor 
faulting, with water- wear, everywhere in this region. 
And yet there is no lack of stout walls still standing 
and seemingly defiant of the elements. Look at 
the cliffs under the east side of Grand View. They 
are lofty heights with little suggestion of weakness 
about them. 

Eastward, still eastward, and presently we arrive 
at Lincoln Point, seventeen miles from Grand View. 
The western view from here is one of great distances 
that fade out in mists and hazes; but under the haze, 
near at hand in the Granite Gorge, the River may 
be seen emerging from behind a long red ridge, then 
disappearing around a projecting talus, only to 
reappear in sections farther on. It seems to sink 
lower in the Gorge as it runs. There is apparently 
a rush of water here — a rapid downward descent. 
You feel as though the River were disappearing in 
underground caverns. 

More directly in front of you another phase of 



164 THE GRAND CANYON 

the River shows in a winding, lazy S, though when 
you are down close to it the water is found to be 
anything but lazy. Sand-bars and green bushes 
appear by the water's edge, and coming in from 
the other side is a dry creek-bed (Unkar Creek) 
that shows more patches of green and lines of sand. 
Maroon and raspberry-red slopes of Unkar forma- 
tion come down to this creek-bed and make a won- 
derful chorus of color. The notes fairly sing, so 
resonant are they. 

This Unkar Creek with its color-display should 
be seen at sunset, for the western light turns the 
hues into things both rare and strange. The ma- 
roons and garnet reds are stimulated by the green 
of the bushes and the gold of the sandy creek-bed. 
They increase in brightness through complemental 
affinity. It should be noticed also that the wind- 
ing line of the creek-bed swings through a little 
group of terraces and slopes and that it accents 
and harmonizes the lines of the slopes. 

The River can be followed far up to the east, 
disappearing for a moment behind a high ridge 
with a crumbling cap of sandstone for its apex, and 
then reappearing. It is a rather long stretch of 
water that is visible. To the right of it is Comanche 
Point, and beyond it the Little Colorado comes in 
to join the greater stream. Still farther on is the 
Marble Canyon, the so-called gateway to the Grand 



GRAND AND DESERT VIEW 165 

Canyon. The eastern wall, in whieli Comanche is 
the high point, has already been referred to as the 
Palisades of the Desert. 

Stretching away beyond the Palisades for a hun- 
dred miles is the Painted Desert. Standing out 
from it the cliffs of the Little Colorado show at first, 
and beyond them appear the Echo Cliffs, the Mor- 
mon Ridge, and other heights. These high divides 
fade away one beyond another until finally lost in 
the distance. Far to the east, almost blotted out 
by lilac atmosphere, you can catch the outline of 
distant mountains. They are a part, no doubt, of 
the great continental sierra. 

For swift change of scene turn a moment and 
look behind you at the sweep of the forest. If you 
look up to the west, toward El Tovar, the horizon 
line will lead you around to the left in a great half- 
circle and you will get the elevation of the Coco- 
nino Plateau. You will notice a large sunken basin 
in here that, owing doubtless to the dip of the 
strata, trends down and off toward the southeastern 
end of the Painted Desert. You look over this 
sunken basin directly south to see a long platform 
that evidently was once the norntal level of the 
plateau. Above and beyond it appear the San 
Francisco Mountains. This is not the view that 
you came to the Canyon to see, but is it not mag- 
nificent ? 



166 THE GEAND CANYON 

Desert View (originally Navaho Point) is two 
miles from Lincoln Point and contains more mul- 
tiplicity and variety in unity than any other out- 
look at the Canyon. The chief view is from the 
point and extends for many miles in almost every 
direction. The elevation (seven thousand four 
hundred and Mty feet) is only a little less than 
Grand View, but the Canyon here is more open. 
The inner Archsean walls are partly broken down 
on the south side and the slopes leading up and out 
are less abrupt. Across the River you will notice 
that the dip of the strata is from west to east, that 
the beds seem to be sinking and disappearing under 
the Palisades. This is, no doubt, responsible for 
the flatter effect. 

The open view is most welcome. And yet the 
steep descent over precipitous walls does not dis- 
appear. There is abundance of cliff under the 
Palisades (Plate 33), and looking down the Canyon 
to the west, you see ridge and promontory and butte 
lift, one above another, in plane after plane of dis- 
tance. All the great buttes and points cut in or 
overlap one another. Their height and depth seem 
stupendous to bewilderment. Perhaps this is en- 
hanced by a striking contrast, for to the west 
everything seems on end, while to the east every- 
thing lies down flat. The perpendicular is sharply 
contrasted with the horizontal. 



GRAND AND DESERT VIEW 167 

The horizontal is, of course, the Painted Desert. 
Looking across it at noontime gives the impression 
of great flatness, with only a few outstanding 
buttes or points, but at sunset the heights become 
glorified, and you are perhaps astonished at the 
hurdles of ridges rising one beyond another. Lines 
of arroyos alternate with lines of ridges, and yet the 
general effect is that of a huge inland basin swinging 
to the east in flat distances. It always seems 
sleeping in the sunlight, dreaming, motionless. Re- 
pose is there, and the feeling of repose is impressed 
upon you by the flowing horizontal lines. What a 
contrast to the perpendicular cliffs of the Canyon 
lying off at right angles to it ! 

Now it should be noticed that these lines which 
contrast with and accent each other do not, para- 
doxically as it may sound, combat each other. 
They meet and blend even in their contrast. The 
horizontal lines of the Kaibab and the Coconino 
in the North Rim seem to run on and into the flat 
lines of the Desert, and the upright lines of the 
Canyon walls are repeated in the Echo Cliffs and 
the Mormon Ridge. Still, it is generally true that 
the Canyon lines of cliff and butte are perpendic- 
ular. They are angle lines and suggest restlessness, 
action, aspiration. Over against them are set the 
Desert lines that in their low relief are horizontal 
and suggest relaxation, quiessence, rest. The con- 



168 THE GRAND CANYON 

trast and yet the unity in the contrast are very re- 
markable. I know of no such landscape elsewhere, 
though one gets a similar effect by the seashore 
where some bold headland stands with its feet in 
the sea and presents its steep cliff-wall to the out- 
stretched ocean. 

But we have not wholly comprehended this view 
by analyzing a web of lines. There is a color-con- 
trast that is perhaps just as remarkable as the ap- 
position of lines. I am not now speaking of color 
in spots of magenta or sang de hoeuf or garnet, but 
of the total effect. Look down the dark Canyon 
and get the red, purple, and blue of it, and then turn 
quickly to the east and note the yellow, gold, and 
rose of the Desert. What superb color-schemes! 
Is there anything disturbing about them? Does 
the one quarrel with the other? Are they not in 
perfect harmony? 

Even the atmosphere may be reckoned with as 
contrast and yet accord. That of the Canyon is 
gas-blue, or purple, or perhaps violet, whereas that 
of the desert is rose-blue, golden yellow, or opalescent. 
I do not now mean the lights or shadows but the 
air itself — that intangible transparency that we 
think colorless but which in reality takes color 
from every sun-shaft striking its dust-laden parti- 
cles. The hotter and dryer the weather the more 



GRAND AND DESERT VIEW 169 

pronounced in color the atmosphere. When there 
is a sand-storm on the Painted Desert the rose 
and violet of the atmosphere change to a reddish 
purple. It is apparent to the dullest eye. But 
there is always more or less of invisible dust in these 
dry regions and there is always more or less of 
colored air. 

To this panorama of line, color, and atmosphere 
you must now add the most abiding beauty of all. 
Look up at the great dome of the sky — the blue 
vault with its white mountains of cumulus piled 
high in the air and perhaps fretted with golden 
fire by the setting sun. When and where have you 
ever seen such a comprehensive depth, such a 
magnificent arch, such a translucent blue ? 

If you look closely at its cobalt depths you may 
perhaps see portions of it breaking into violet vibra- 
tions — vibrations that at times seem to form into 
faintly-seen descending shafts. What an immensity 
of precious color above the world! And how it 
seems to cap the vast landscape I Compared in 
color with the earth it is the greatest apposition, 
the mightiest contrast of all, and yet again, and 
finally, there is no lack of harmony. The dome fits 
down in color as in form and completes the picture. 
Truly a marvellous picture I 

People come here to see the Canyon — ^to look 



170 THE GRAND CANYON 

down. But they should also look up. For the 
sky here, as elsewhere, is the crowning feature of 
landscape. Out of it comes light, light the creator 
of all things visible, light of which the beautiful blue 
is only a broken and dispersed fragment. 



CHAPTER XIV 

FROM DAWN TO DUSK 

Days and weeks can be given to Desert View 
without exhausting the scene or the interest. You 
are away from the hotel and the crowd, and can see 
things like a lone eagle from your point of rock. 
Both the rock and the eagle are here (an eagle 
usually has a nest every summer not five hundred 
yards to the east of Desert View), so the allusion is 
not forced. If you watch the eagle you will see 
that she does her coming and going early in the 
morning and late in the evening, and, if you follow 
her example, you, too, will go out to your point of 
rock at dawn and at sunset. 

Perhaps you will have noticed, as at Lincoln 
Point, that the Canyon here is happily disposed for 
morning and evening effects because it runs prac- 
tically east and west, and the light strikes not so 
much across it as along its length. The sun comes 
up over the Painted Desert and drives its golden 
shafts down the Canyon for sixty miles or more; 
at evening the reddened beams drive back through 
the Canyon upon the mesas and ridges of this same 

171 



172 THE GRAND CANYON 

Painted Desert. If there is anything unusual, any 
special spread of splendor coming from that 

" Nebulous star we call the sun," 

you are sure to see it here. 

The first gray half-light of the dawn has no effect 
on the Canyon. It is only when it turns pale yellow 
and begins to creep around the horizon that faint 
reflections appear upon the eastern faces of the 
Kaibab and Coconino. Often the light from be- 
low the verge at first strikes high up on the zenith, 
making a white spot on the blue that in turn illu- 
mines the depth; and, often again, feathery cirrus 
clouds up there will catch the light and begin to 
redden, casting down pale pinks upon the walls 
below. As the light increases in the east the color 
brightens from silver and rose to pink and perhaps 
carmine. The face-walls make answer in grays, 
then silvers, then saffrons creeping into orange, 
followed by roses and heliotropes. They are won- 
derfully delicate colors. 

One by one the tops of the buttes and points and 
promontories take up and carry on the light far 
down the Canyon. First one glows and shifts into 
a bright garb, and then another farther on repeats 
the litany of color. As the light increases, the color 
spreads down the walls from the high points. The 
local hue of the strata begins to come out, the pur- 



FROM DAWN TO DUSK 173 

pies of the depth awaken, the shadows turn ultra- 
marine, the ah* becomes gray-blue, or sometimes 
pink over purple. 

The reflected lights from sky and cloud arouse 
the Canyon to its inner depths. There is a shaking 
off of the night gloom, and if the sky in the east is 
a broad band of orange or fiery with red clouds, 
the reflecting walls will show very lively hues. 
When the sun itself comes over the horizon there is 
instant focussing of high lights on the rocky points 
and the forming of blue shadows behind every in- 
terposing tree, ridge, butte, and promontory. The 
change is swift and positive. 

With the coming of the sun you can almost make 
yourself believe there is a faint music of the ele- 
ments, or at least a trailing of wings. But no. 

"Not with the roll of thunder drums. 
But softly, soundless, as beseems 
The alchemist of color dreams, 
The Sun God comes." 

The light falls on the Kaibab faces and changes 
them to light gold or warm orange, Wotan^s Throne 
reddens, the tips of the buttes turn pink; but there 
is no sound to warn you of the change. Nor is there 
any permanence in the change. The colors shift 
and go, and as the sun lifts higher in the sky you 
notice that, while the local color is more pronounced, 



174 THE GRAND CANYON 

the reflected colors from the sky and cloud seem to 
grow fainter and duller. The splendor of the dawn 
soon goes out before the more commonplace color 
of the morning. 

For as the sun continues to rise, the Canyon be- 
gins to lose not only in hue but in definiteness. 
This has already been alluded to in connection with 
the abnormal appearance of the buttes at noonday. 
The sun high in the heavens plays havoc with lines 
and surfaces. Planes begin to shut up bellows-like 
and perspective collapses. Drawing, too, fails. 
Objects do not project or recede, or give a sense of 
bulk or weight, but seem continuous or superim- 
posed, one upon another. The long promontories 
running out from the Rim not only lose their thick- 
ness and resemble stage screens, but they lose their 
relative position. After nine o'clock in the morn- 
ing even the isolated buttes do not seem isolated. 
The overhead light reflects rather than illumines, 
distorts the normal appearance, and makes every- 
thing uncertain, illusory, indefinite. A haze en- 
velops the Canyon and a beautiful blur is upon 
it; but the effect is disappointing to those who 
would see the reality. You must turn to other 
things until the depth comes back to itself in the 
late afternoon. 

The midday period is occasionally varied by 
flying cloud-shadows that chase each other across 




as (N 



FROM DAWN TO DUSK 175 

the platforms, or by sunbursts that fling down their 
search-lights into the Canyon, revealing hidden 
depths and dormant colors. Rain, of course, veils 
everything. Even the thunder-storms that let 
down trailing fringes of rain — let them down ten 
thousand feet — shut out the view temporarily. 
But they also often bring out the profiles of the 
buttes in relief and reveal their fine lines with great 
efiPect. In fact, one does not know what forceful 
contours these buttes and promontories possess 
until he sees them with a rain-veil behind them. 
They then begin to resemble sierra ridges in their 
outline drawing. 

Often, again, after the rain has passed, the hot 
rocks will steam and the sunlight will flash on wet 
pinnacles with a glittering effect which, shown in 
relief against deep-blue shadows, and in connection 
perhaps with a rainbow and dark passing clouds, 
is very picturesque. The rainbow at the Canyon 
happens quite easily, and sometimes apparently 
without rain. I have already mentioned the ap- 
pearance at noontime of the spectrum colors, wav- 
ing like a flag, in the cirrus directly overhead. 
And with no other clouds in sight. It is a very 
strange phenomenon. 

During the long summer afternoon the Canyon 
seems to doze in the sunlight. It has a blue-gray 
color without accent, tone, or quality. The tourist 



176 THE GRAND CANYOISr 

may think it wonderful but the artist knows its 
monotony. At five o'clock, however, a change be- 
gins to take place. The Canyon colors begin to 
revive faintly, the blue shadows draw a little behind 
buttes and promontories, the ledges and platforms 
and pinnacles begin to lengthen and lift, the walls 
become enormous in bulk and sharpen in contour. 
Gradually perspective and planes come back. As 
the sun slips down the western sky the whole Can- 
yon continues to grow more intense in light and 
shadow, more acute in line and color. It is the 
dramatic hour. 

The spectacle of a Canyon sunset is usually one 
of intense light and warmth, and the sky absorbs 
attention to the exclusion of everything else. Per- 
haps it should not. One may not wholly agree 
with Whistler in his jibe at those who admire "a 
foolish sunset," and yet still consider that the effect 
here, on Canyon and Painted Desert, is perhaps 
more beautiful than the cause itself. The effect is 
more subdued, more subtle in its mingling of local 
hues with the colors flashed by the sun. It is color 
filtered, strained, refined, and for that reason per- 
haps more acceptable as more purely sensuous. 

The various hues that appear on the Canyon 
walls at sunset are akin to the evening glows of 
snow mountains. The very brilliant reflections are 
not usually from the sun itself, but from the sky 



FROM DAWN TO DUSK 177 

or clouds that are set glowing with color by its light. 
The molten golds, scarlets, and carmines that sur- 
round the sun, or are above it, are the torches that 
fire the buttes with flame and turn the pinnacles 
into towers of golden light. Often they "glow like 
plated Mars,'* and occasionally the illusion of 
molten metal appears in pinnacles, resembling the 
red of hot iron that finally dies out in a beautiful 
ash gray. 

From Desert View at sunset, tints and tones in- 
numerable are seen, not only on Canyon walls, but 
on the mesas of the Painted Desert. The barrage 
of light seems to lift and lift, striking farther away 
as the sun sinks in the west. You can see it move 
along the ridges, spreading from cliff to cliff, and 
tingeing all the faces a bright vermilion. Far to 
the east it flies, growing fainter and fainter on butte 
and ridge, until it is lost in the thick violet air of 
distance. Navaho Mountain is too far away to 
respond in anything more pronounced than a rosy 
tone. It is the last echo. 

These sun-shafts and rock reflections on the Des- 
ert are just as remarkable as those in the Can- 
yon. The background of the Desert, with its thick, 
dust-laden air, makes possible a perfect blend. 
At sundown the general tone of the whole flat basin 
is golden with a rose tinge in it, and through this 
envelope you see the red of the Echo Cliffs glowing 



178 THE GRAND CANYON 

like the fire of a bright opal. The jewel quality of 
desert light and color are never so apparent as just 
then and there. 

Occasionally at sunset a wind will pass over the 
Desert's face, raising great clouds of dust that reach 
up almost to the zenith. This dust-veil is, generally 
speaking, rosy red, but like the dawn and the sunset 
sky, it also shows faintly the colors of the spectrum 
arranged in order. It is a rather thick veiling, and 
the barrage of sun-fire meets opposition. The cliffs 
through it show lurid, the buttes smoulder, the 
mesas are ashes of roses. It is a red-and-purple 
mystery. 

If you look now quickly to the west you will find 
that the Canyon, too, in some sympathy with the 
dust-cloud, will also show strange hues. The air 
down in the gorge is thick with purples, but above 
this a violet atmosphere lies under the Rim and 
around the buttes and points. The projecting 
promontories that, seen far down the Canyon, seem 
to overlap one another, now appear once more like 
the wings of a stage-setting illumined by dull Bengal 
fire. Blues and mauves and heliotropes are every- 
where. It is a violet fantasy in sky and Rim and 
Canyon, as unreal as any vision out of the Arabian 
Nights. And it becomes still more fantastic, as 
well as exquisite, if you will lie down on your point 
of rock and look at it sideways, with your head on 



FROM DAWN TO DUSK 179 

the rock. The position seems to bring into play 
some unusual or unfatigued portion of the retina, 
for the colors appear greatly enhanced and beauti- 
fied. All the world now seems swimming in lilac 
and violet. 

Turn again to the Painted Desert and you will 
find that the maze and mystery of it have deepened 
while you were looking at the Canyon. St. John at 
Patmos can have seen nothing more supernaturally 
glowing. And note that the glow is not merely in 
the sky but all around you. You are within it. The 
purple air envelops everything, and the ridges and 
cliffs faintly seen through it finally go out in rose 
colors as Point Sublime to the west disappears in 
gun-metal blues. The whole world now seems like 
some dark opal, with dull fire-spots on its surface. 

Once more, from your recumbent position on the 
rock, look around in the growing dusk at the vast 
circle of the horizon. It is complete save for the 
small segment of forest behind you. Turn over on 
your back and look straight up at the sky 

"Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars." 

The red moon is coming up over the pines back of 
you, but as yet makes little impression on either the 
sky or the Canyon. The dusk enfolds you. By 
midnight the air will clear, the moon will whiten, 
the sky will deepen, the stars will glisten. Before 



180 THE GRAND CANYON 

dawn the morning star will look so large that, like 
the Arabian sun, you can fancy seventy thousand 
angels necessary to start it each morning on its 
way. But now there is nothing but a dusky world 
swinging in blue space and carrying with it an 
envelope of colored air. 

How intensely impressive this purple veil of night ! 
The Canyon is even more wonderful in color and 
atmosphere than in rock strata and countersunk 
River. It is not the eighth wonder of the world but 
the first. 



CHAPTER XV 
THE TUSAYAN FOREST 

A WEEK at the Canyon may suffice to exhaust 
not only one's adjectives but also the keenness of 
one's appreciation. The imagination perhaps lags 
and does not rise along the perpendicular walls as 
on the first day. The aesthetic sense becomes a 
little dulled and we cease to wonder or stand 
amazed or lose ourselves in a dream of beauty. 
Possibly it is time to vary the scene and renew 
sensation by change. 

There is but one change of scene at the Canyon, 
but happily that is a complete one. It is the forest 
that lies back from the Rim. A few steps within 
it and the panorama of the Canyon has disappeared 
and you are among the cedars and pinyons, as shut 
out and away from the "view" as though in an 
Alaskan wilderness. Your circle of vision is now 
fifty or a hundred feet in diameter — ^no more. If 
you move back a quarter of a mile you encounter 
the Western yellow pines, the forest opens up a 
little in aisles and parkways, but your range is still 
limited. The "view" in fact now counts for little, 
and your interest must be centred upon the in- 

181 



182 THE GRAND CANYON 

timate things of plant and animal life. Therein 
lies the contrast to the Canyon. 

If you start back into the forest without making 
a mental note of your general direction you may 
become confused and lose your way. Once in the 
woods all the cedars and pines will look alike to 
you, the rocks and swales will offer no guide-posts; 
the trails — well, they are somewhat mixed with 
cattle-runs and may lead any way but the right 
way. You must remember the points of the com- 
pass and be able to locate them by the sun. Then 
if you get geographically askew you can consult 
the sun for east and west, and know that if you 
are east of El Tovar, walking to the west will surely 
bring you out on the railway, as walking north will 
just as surely bring you out on the Rim. 

The forest back from the Rim is not an isolated 
region. It is part of the great Plateau Country — 
the Coconino Plateau. Drive a spade into the 
ground anywhere and it will soon strike the lime- 
stone. Both the limestone and the forest once 
stretched across where the Canyon now yawns 
and joined their kind on the Northern Rim. The 
soil is usually bone-dry and only a few inches in 
depth. It supports no exuberant growth, for the 
rainfall is not great, and such as there is drains off 
quickly into the arroyos and small canyons. Only 
the hardiest life can exist here, though down in the 



THE TUSAYAN FOREST 183 

Canyon, where there are springs and streams, all 
kinds of plant life may flom-ish. The plateau vege- 
tation is more or less desert in character. If you are 
not used to wood travel you are made sharply aware 
of this by your feet coming in contact with the 
spines of ground cacti and your head and shoulders 
with the dry branches of the cedars. Everything 
here is dry, hard, and sharp. 

The cedar (it is not a cedar but a juniper) is a 
characteristic growth. It is twisted of trunk, 
octopus-like in spreading roots, chary of foliage and 
berries. Dry and shredded in the bark, resistant of 
wind, fighting off the elements, keeping its green 
in spite of winter storm, it holds fast with tenacity 
and endures with fortitude. One can hardly guess 
its age from its tw^enty or more feet of height, 
though the bulk of the trunk near the ground sug- 
gests a clue. Many of them, no doubt, are cen- 
turies old. After they die, years elapse before they 
fall and perish through decay. The plateau is cov- 
ered with their gnarled skeletons still standing, with 
bleached arms and broken branches, against wind 
and storm. 

The pinyon, sometimes called a nut-pine or stone- 
pine, is a dwarf, too, growing no higher than the 
cedar, and is perhaps less hardy in growth. Wind, 
fire, and mistletoe harry it, but it grows readily and 
makes up in breed what it lacks in toughness. One 



184 THE GRAND CANYON 

finds it everywhere along the Rim. The Indians 
gather the nuts and make a bread from them — that 
is, if the jays do not arrive before them. 

The Arizona or Western yellow pine grows back 
from the Rim and is the largest tree on the plateau. 
It has a thick trunk, stout branches, reddish bark, 
and an irregular round top that lifts at times a 
hundred feet or more in the air. When old these 
pines show the ravages of wind and lightning. 
They do not grow thickly near the Canyon, and 
standing alone are liable to be blown down by heavy- 
winds. Even in gentle breezes they sway consid- 
erably, and are usually whispering and sounding in 
their tops. They make up the bulk of the Tusayan 
Forest. 

Very beautiful are the open aisles of the forest as 
one walks there late in the afternoon when the sun- 
shafts, striking the tops of the yellow pines, turn 
their green to gold. That greenish gold against 
the blue of the sky with the reddish yellow of the 
bark beneath make up a color-harmony that you 
might think quite wonderful if the Canyon were not 
so near at hand. And how stately the pines I 
Every member of the family stands erect, is arrow- 
headed, arrow-shafted, and shoots directly at the 
zenith. They always command admiration. Here 
in the forest they grow singly, or in groups of three 
or four, but each one lifts its shaft and shakes out 



THE TUSAYAN FOBEST 185 

its needles independently of the others. A noble 
tree is the Western pine. 

The conifers are about the only trees that can be 
looked for at this seven thousand feet of altitude, 
and yet there are others. A few scrub-oaks, some 
frail ashes, and some locusts grow here and there. 
The acacia family will occasionally creep up from 
lower levels, but it requires heat and does not flour- 
ish on the Rim. The Douglas and the white spruce 
do not grow above the Rim, while the aspen and the 
live-oak appear across the River on the Kaibab 
Plateau but not in the Tusayan Forest. 

Of course there are many bush growths, some of 
them standing so thick that they take on the ap- 
pearance of chaparral. They are usually gnarled 
and twisted in stem, shaggy in bark, and hard in 
point. The cliff-rose, sometimes called the quinine- 
bush (cincona) or "mountain mahogany," is one 
of the most prominent of them. It often grows in 
thickets, and when its white flowers are in bloom, 
scents the air with its perfume for long distances. 
Next to it one finds in the open spaces, especially 
to the west of El Tovar, many acres of sage-brush, 
peppered with bunches of Mormon tea. The so- 
called "mescal" grows in isolated spots on the pla- 
teaus, but it prefers the Canyon terraces as warmer 
and more protected. Just so with most of the 
yuccas, Spanish bayonets, and cacti. Here in the 



186 THE GRAND CANYON 

woods, especially among the dwarf growths along 
the Rim, one often finds the pincushion cactus 
growing down close to the ground, and in July put- 
ting forth a beautiful magenta-hued flower. Other 
varieties blossom out with white or yellow or purple 
petals. 

None of these desert growths, however, flourish 
well in the forest. Down on the Tonto slopes, rooted 
in a dry mineral soil, they take on the strange hues 
of the hydrangea in our Eastern dooryard. There 
they are at home and unique in both environment 
and development. By way of contrast the forest 
in the spring grows many flowers in its open spaces, 
and all summer long there are relays of anemones, 
mountain-pinks, Maricopa lilies, larkspurs, lupins, 
pentstemons, paint-brushes, sunflowers, asters. The 
variety is much greater than has been generally 
recognized. After the showers in July there are 
legions of swaying scarlet pentstemons under the 
rock ledges and innumerable beds of small close- 
lying flowers in the forest spaces — blue-eyed, star- 
shaped growths that have an affinity with the 
mosses and lichens, humble growths that do not 
flare or startle but charm by their lowliness and 
their simple patterning. The floral display is often 
quite puzzling, even to the botanist, so numerous are 
the varieties, so odd the forms and colors. And 
almost all of them scentless. The great masses of 



THE TUSAYAN FOREST 187 

them are born to blush unseen; but so far as I have 
observed they waste Httle sweetness on the desert 
air. 

Beautifully as these flowers grow in the aisles of 
the forest, they have not the absorbing interest, 
perhaps the sentimental appeal, of those that giow 
on the rock ledges of the Canyon. The mosses 
that lie in beds along shelving rocks and droop down 
over precipices, the flowers that blow along narrow 
platforms, the thin golden grasses that sway in the 
wind from a cranny in the wall, seem so pure in 
type, so pale in hue, so graceful in form ! InsuflS- 
cient soil and moisture have made them willowy in 
stem and bleached in flower and leaf, but fighting 
the elements for life has given them a lithe quality, 
a tenacious grip on the rock, a patient endurance. 
How fear-free and care-free they appear to us as 
they nod and sway in the breezes from their eerie 
heights! These are the true cliff-dwellers. What 
patience, serenity, and silence they might teach us 
if we would only pause and ponder ! 

The forest naturally gives some protection to 
animal life, and time was when there were cougars, 
timber-wolves, bear, and deer here in abundance; 
but they have nearly all slipped away, and are now 
to be found only in the more remote woods of the 
north side. Some deer remain and are occasionally 
seen at sunset, in bands of three or four, near a 



188 THE GRAND CANYON 

cactus patch or a cattle "tank." They make 
trails down to the River, over very precipitous 
heights, for in the summer months they must have 
occasional water, but their natural runways are in 
the forest. The mountain-sheep — there are a few 
left in the Canyon — rather outdo the deer in trail- 
making, though they do not come up to the Rim 
and are not found in the forest. 

The flexible coyote roams the woods, if there is 
any food to be gained thereby, but he prefers the 
open. He is a past master of roaming, and usually 
makes himself at home wherever he happens to be. 
Any place that lends to sneaking and skulking is 
quite to his fancy — ^provided always that there is a 
chance of something to eat. His appetite is ex- 
tremely good, but it seldom meets with complete 
liquidation in this forest region. The Painted 
Desert is a happier hunting-ground for him, though 
over in the Aztec Amphitheatre country he occa- 
sionally does a prosperous business digging wood- 
rats out of their mounds. The energy and shrewd- 
ness of the coyote are never to be underestimated. 
He is the genius of his family and can pick a living 
where his relatives would starve. 

The wood-rat is found almost everywhere, and he, 
too, has energy if not shrewdness. The marvellous 
mounds of rubbish that he accumulates quite outdo 
those of the muskrat. His wood-piles in the forest 



THE TUSAYAN FOEEST 189 

furnish fuel for campers and interest for tourists; 
but in spite of that he is something of a nuisance, 
especially if near a ranch-house or camp. For 
he does not discriminate in accumulating build- 
ing materials and will carry off a monkey-wrench, 
a bottle, a bar of soap, a glove, as quickly as a stick 
of wood or an ear of corn. The kangaroo-rat, the 
chipmunk, and the various ground-squirrels are less 
meddlesome, and perhaps more edible, for the bob- 
cat likes them and the rattlesnake finds them ac- 
ceptable diet. Everything hereabouts has some- 
thing prowling on its trail and knows how to watch, 
listen, run, or fight with poison. The jack-rabbit 
and the cottontail set the pace in running, but even 
such small people as the lizards are excellent sprint- 
ers for short distances. 

As for the poison-carriers, Mr. Dellenbaugh tells 
us there are nine kinds of rattlesnakes in this south- 
western desert region, but in the immediate Canyon 
I have met with only two species — the diamond- 
back and the side-winder. The side-winder (so 
called because of his wriggling to the side in going 
forward) is the more common of the two, though he 
is not frequently met with. In color he is a dirty 
reddish brown, in size not large, in attack not very 
fierce. Of course he is poisonous enough if he hap- 
pens to hit you, but usually he is rather sluggish in 
coming into action. A coral snake, so called, with 



190 THE GRAND CANYON 

white rings about his body, is more venomous in 
look, but whether so in fact I cannot say. I have 
found them only on the Tonto platforms, where even 
the lizards are few and far between. In the Tusa- 
yan Forest the reptiles do not seem to flourish. 
Apparently they love the open better. But the vis- 
itor at the Canyon is not likely to meet them in 
either place. 

The birds are everywhere — at sunrise in the Can- 
yon perhaps, at noon or afternoon in the woods. 
There are not many of them in number or in species, 
though from day to day one meets with stray mem- 
bers of almost every family. The pine forest is not 
the best place in the world for the mocking-bird, 
the catbird, and the Western robin; but they, with 
the bluebird, the orchard oriole, the pewee, king- 
bird, thrush, grosbeak, flicker, turtle-dove, are fre- 
quently seen. They have no peculiar fitness for the 
Canyon or the forest, and perhaps just "happen" 
here. The cedar waxwing goes with the cedar or 
juniper berries, and one sees him along the Rim 
with his fellows in small flocks. He is less brilliant, 
is grayer in plumage, and not quite so large as the 
Eastern bird; but his appetite is just as keen and he 
is always interested in cedar berries. 

The jays, both in numbers and in noise, monop- 
olize attention in the open places of the forest 
and along the Rim. They are usually wrangling 



THE TUSAYAN FOREST 191 

and jangling with each other, probably over the 
supply of cedar berries or pine-nuts, both of which 
they eat. They are found in pairs, or in flocks of 
haK a dozen, and from their penchant for the pin- 
yons, they are known collectively as "pinyon jays." 
There are two varieties usually in evidence. One 
of them is similar, if not identical, with the Wood- 
house jay. The plumage is dove-colored or grayish 
blue, with blue tail-feathers. Even more frequently 
seen is the beautiful crested jay. He makes much 
chatter in lieu of song. His crest in flight is flat- 
tened back upon his head, but as soon as he alights 
on a limb the crest is instantly elevated and he be- 
gins scolding, perhaps at a graceful, long-eared 
Kaibab squirrel or some lone porcupine lumbering 
along the trail. 

The hairy woodpecker is not so abundant that one 
sees him every day, but other varieties are seen in 
quantities unhmited. The poor-will is oftener 
heard, in the night and early morning, than seen. 
He belongs to the night-hawk family, and when 
not in the air rests on the ground, with some of the 
instincts and a little of the color of the burrowing 
owl. His call is apparently an abbreviation of 
whip-poor-will. Its reiteration at night is monoto- 
nous, not to say irritating, to the sleepless camper. 

The owls and the bats are usually down under the 
Rim. The Canyon walls, with their fissures and 



192 THE GRAJTD CANYON 

caves, offer excellent harborage for them, and it is 
there that they pass their days, coming out in the 
early twilight to explore for food. In the daytime 
I have seen the small gray-green humming-bird go 
bustling into these cracks and openings, as though 
daring the inhabitants to mortal combat, but 
nothing came out save the humming-bird. He is 
the same quarrelsome little ball of feathers here as 
elsewhere. But he is not peculiar to the Canyon 
any more than the pretty horned larks that one sees 
down on the Tonto platforms, or the rock-wrens 
that oi^e meets along the trails. There is a Canyon 
wren, very demure in gray and very inquisitive, 
that is supposed to be native to this place; but the 
specimens I have seen seem little different from the 
cactus-wren of the desert that builds a nest in the 
suhuaro or the cholla. 

Of swallows there are several varieties, and all of 
them are very much at home along the Rim. One 
is a small telegraph-wire swallow that flies in nar- 
row circles with a rather leisurely wing. At eve- 
ning they gather in numbers on some point of rock 
extending out in the Canyon, and then, apparently 
by signal, they all plunge down the Canyon to- 
gether, like small-boy bathers jumping from a raft. 
Another species flies on a strong, rapid wing, like 
that of the chimney-swallow. His swiftness is ex- 
traordinary. As you stand on the edge of the Rim 



THE TUSAYAN FOREST 193 

he dashes by your ear with a beat of wing that 
sounds like the quick crumpling of heavy paper. 
He plunges down into the Canyon for perhaps a 
thousand feet and then rises straight up toward 
the xenith, soaring and circling with supreme ease. 
His flight is remarkable and his dash over the Rim 
surprising in its disregard of abyss and precipice. 
Yet why should we be surprised? Why should a 
swallow look for danger in the air ? Is not that his 
element ? 

These birds of the air, what a background the 
Canyon is for them ! The golden eagle is at home 
here, making a nest on the ledge of some outstand- 
ing pinnacle — some huge rock spine cut off from the 
main wall — and there, secure from man and coyote, 
rearing the young. At dawn and sunset the pair 
go forth on air cruises. The flight is slow, more 
like that of a sea-gull than any other bird, and with 
little circling. But at times the male bird goes up 
in the storm-clouds, stands still like a box kite just 
ahead of the storm, and seems to defy the lightning. 
No vulture or buzzard ever goes so high or looks 
so speck-like against the blue. Most of the eagles 
seen by tourists are vultures. The mistake is 
natural, for the latter is the better flyer. 

The brown-backed vulture, often seen circling 
easily under the Canyon walls, is the supreme em- 
bodiment of flight. Nothing could be more free, 



194 THE GRAND CANYON 

more careless, and at the same time more certain. 
The stiff-set wings do not beat the air; they manip- 
ulate it, turn it, catch it, and bend it into service. 
Hour after hour, in all winds and in all directions, 
those stiff wings keep balancing and readjusting 
themselves to the wind, but do no initial propelling. 
Yet how that black spot wheels around an amphi- 
theatre, glides across a canyon, soars up into the 
blue, drops like a bolt into the depths. He does no 
looping of loops or tail-spins, neither does he crum- 
ple up and fall to the earth with a crash. He does 
not move with a roar to be heard twenty miles 
down the Canyon; he slips along almost as silently 
as his black shadow under him. When within a 
few feet of him you can sometimes hear the cut of 
his flight feathers, like the slight whiz of an arrow, 
but that is all. He drifts through the air with ap- 
parently as little effort as thistle-down. How per- 
fect the working of that flying-machine I 

Wings and the will to fly! Sunlight and the 
world to roam in! Are we more fortunate, more 
perfect in development, more efficient in equip- 
ment ? In desert lands the bird, the beast, and the 
plant are reared in adversity. Every tithe of en- 
ergy is brought into use and the highest develop- 
ment is attained. The wings are trained to the 
thin air as the foot to the hard rock and the root 
to the shallow soil. They do not quarrel with the 



THE TUSAYAN FOREST 195 

conditions of life but accept them. They become 
a part of the environment, are in accord with Na- 
ture, and reflect her patience and her serenity. Are 
we as harmonious in our artificial environment? 
Are we ? 



CHAPTER XVI 
THE CLIFF-DWELLER 

Along the Rim, and back from it in the Tusayan 
Forest, one frequently sees at the present time 
mounds of scattered stones, with perhaps indica- 
tions of old walls, or trenches now half-filled with 
earth, leaves, and pine-needles. Near them one 
may turn up bits of broken pottery, arrow-heads, 
stone hammers, old mealing-stones. Elsewhere 
about the forest or the Canyon there are found re- 
mains of the wickiup, the lean-to, and the hogan. 
These latter may be of recent origin, but the broken 
stone walls that once made up Indian forts, appar- 
ently belong to an earlier period. 

There have been scattered Indian tribes around 
and about the Canyon from such time as the mem- 
ory of man runneth not to the contrary. They 
were here when the Spaniards first came marching 
across the country in 1540 seeking "the seven cities 
of Cibola" and their supposed stores of gold. Small 
bands seem always to have lived along the Rim. 
Possibly they, or their immediate ancestors, were 
the ones who erected the stone forts as outposts 
and, later on, the wickiups and lean-tos as summer 
camps. 

196 



THE CLIFF-DWELLER 197 

Perhaps at the same time with the outliers Hving 
along the Rim, there were other groups that lived 
down in the Canyon. The weaker ones — those of 
inferior numbers — ^probably sought out the Canyon 
for protection from enemies. It must have been a 
natural fortress ^if it were necessary to fight and a 
maze or labyrinth if it were necessary to hide. 
Predatory bands from the Painted Desert and be- 
yond were probably beating across the Plateau 
Country, seeking out and robbing the weaker 
tribes, from the earliest days. There was always 
need to feint or fight. 

But the few families that lived down in the Can- 
yon could hardly grow in numbers. Circumstances 
were not favorable to such development. The 
Navahos, over on the Painted Desert, could spread 
out on their flat mesas and count their warriors by 
the thousands. They had not only agricultural 
lands but grazing country for herds of cattle and 
horses. But not so the Canyon Indians. They 
were only a handful, hemmed in by environing walls, 
with little water, and practically no land for culti- 
vation. Their "gardens*' were mere spots in a 
wilderness of rock, kept green by a chance spring 
of water; and their houses are supposed to have 
been merely the enclosed recesses under the cliffs 
— wind-worn pockets in the rock fortified by an 
entrance-wall. 



198 THE GRAND CANYON 

Perhaps compelling conditions became modified 
after a period and some of the family units in the 
Canyon came together and began living in small * 
cities on the Plateau, building community houses 
with thick stone walls, no doors, and ladder entrances 
by the roofs. Perhaps, again, the community 
groups, or pueblo Indians, and the Canyon dwellers 
were always separate and went their different ways, 
as their ancestors before them from the beginning. 
Theories are more easily established than right con- 
clusions. The few Indians under the wall may have 
always been few. The Spaniards found large cities 
three or four days' journey afield, but the Canyon 
itself was practically tenantless. 

The remains of these weaker bands, often referred 
to as the Cliff-Dwellers, are not very numerous or 
extensive. And this in spite of the fact that Powell 
found in the canyons through which he came iso- 
lated ruins of aboriginal houses, forts, sentry-posts, 
stairways cut in the stone, wooden ladders leading 
down over inaccessible heights, cisterns, mescal 
pits, gardens, pottery, pestles, baskets, mats. At 
Mille Crag Bend he found a three-story building of 
stone laid up with mud mortar, and farther on kivas 
or underground rooms for religious ceremonies. 
Elsewhere, outside of the Canyon, there have been 
discovered many genuine cliff-dwellings of the 
Plateau Indians in which, there can be no doubt. 



THE CLIFF-DWELLER 199 

people lived at one time. Large communities dwelt 
in some of the wind-worn recesses, in the caves 
mider cliffs, in the narrow canyons. In the Hoven- 
weap district in Utah there are large romid towers, 
extensive square rooms, walls of stone put up in 
adobe mortar that point to a high development;* 
and near Globe, Arizona, there have been recently 
discovered some very remarkable dwellings in a 
narrow canyon. 

But in the Grand Canyon proper there is slight 
evidence for permanent cliff-dwelling. There are 
small gardens that were worked at one time, springs 
and trails and mescal pits, pictographs on rocks, 
and fire marks in caves; but there is a dearth of 
buildings or habitations of any sort. Even Indians 
require living space, with some measure of ground 
to cultivate and some flow of water for irrigation. 
They cannot subsist on the view. In the immediate 
Grand Canyon there is not sufficient land or water 
for a community of any size. Indian Garden, be- 
low El Tovar, was no doubt cultivated, and a few 
Indians lived there in the ancient days; but this is 
the one spot on the south side of the Grand Can- 
yon where livable conditions are to be found. 

There have always been more water, garden spaces, 
and Indian relics on the north than on the south 
side of the Grand Canyon; and farther away, some 

* See Journal of American Archeology, December, 1918. 



200 THE GEAND CANYON 

forty miles to the west of El Tovar by the Topo- 
cobya Trail, one comes to Havasupai (or Cataract) 
Canyon, where, three thousand feet down, a small 
tribe of Havasupais live at the present time. In 
this narrow canyon, with its fine blue water, some 
one hundred and fifty Indians manage to exist by 
growing corn, beans, melons, and other garden 
produce. Their dwellings are largely of hogan 
pattern, put together of brush and mud mortar. 
Some caves in the Canyon walls exist, but the 
Havasupais do not live in them except in time of 
flood, when driven out from below. They are not 
cliff-dwellers. 

Now under the Rim of the Grand Canyon, some- 
times several hundred feet down, on the protected 
ledges of the Kaibab, crowded in the wind-worn 
scoops of the wall, there are many so-called " cliff- 
dwellings" that are hardly such in fact. They are 
usually about three feet in width, f oiu* feet in height, 
and between four and six feet in length. They are 
made of loose rock put up as an outside wall, and, 
when completed, this was often chinked or plas- 
tered with a mud mortar. Frequently a doorway or 
entrance, about two or three feet square, was put 
in, and this was sometimes built with a wooden 
lintel fastened in the mortar. 

Nearly all of these structures have been broken 
into, and nothing now remains of their one-time 



THE CLIFF-DWELLER 201 

contents. In examining dozens of them I never 
found any aboriginal relics except, in a single 
instance, a stone pestle and a flat mortar that 
might have been used for grinding corn. Out of 
one I got a rattlesnake, and out of another came a 
coyote and two cubs, but nothing that told the 
story of the builders or their purpose. They never 
were dwellings for the living, because too small for 
human habitation and too inaccessible for daily 
use. They are found on the most eerie ledges, and 
sometimes it is not possible to reach them save by 
a rope or ladder let down from above. They were 
perhaps designed for others than the living. 

The placing of these rock enclosures on ledges 
and points difficult to reach, and usually hidden 
from the view of any one travelling along the Rim, 
suggests that they were possibly Indian graves. 
The size and form of them, the small door, and the 
sealing up with mud mortar all tend to confirm 
such an impression. The Indians of the Painted 
Desert in the ancient days were perhaps not al- 
ways given to burning their dead; possibly they 
trailed up here to the Canyon to entomb their chiefs 
or head men — to hide them from foes and prevent 
sacrilege. There could not be found in Nature 
anywhere a more protected or a more appropriate 
place for burial. The Indian gods were supposed 
to dwell in the Canyon and watch over the dead. 



202 THE GEAND CANYON 

Besides, walled in the rock, there was some chance 
of the body remaining intact until the Final Day. 
The Egyptians were not the only ones who hoped 
for the long-continued endurance of the body. 
Nor were the Indians the only ones to be disap- 
pointed of their hope. All graves sooner or later 
are despoiled and the dust within goes back to the 
dust without. The Tombs of the Kings in Biban 
el Meluk have become the parade-ground of tour- 
ists, and the possible grave of a Moki chief a whelp- 
ing-place for coyotes! Nature forgets as well as 
man. 

But it is more probable that these stone struc- 
tures were depots or caches where corn and other 
dry grains were stored. The rock ledges offered 
protection from weather, and the mud mortar kept 
out the ground-squirrels and wood-rats. The neces- 
sity for hiding, or placing in accessible spots, 
would not be less with caches than with graves. 
The marauder or plunderer always has his wits 
about him in a semi-desert land like this Plateau 
Country. It is a difficult region to travel through 
because of the lack of food and water; and if the 
traveller, even to-day, would keep either the one 
or the other, he must resort to hiding. 

Some confirmation of the cache theory comes from 
the older settlers at the Canyon, who have reported 
the finding of corn-cobs and dried maguey roots in 






PJwiOQraph by W. F. Sesser, copyrighted by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa 
Fe Railroad. 

Plate 32. CANYON IN SNOW-STORM. 



THE CLIFF-DWELLER 203 

these enclosed rock pockets. Moreover, the Hava- 
supais still use the caves in Havasupai Canyon to 
store dried vegetables and fruits. But there will 
probably always be some question about the Grand 
Canyon depositories because of their placing in 
such inaccessible positions. Several that I have 
surveyed, and tried to explore, seem impossible of 
reach save by long ladders. That might prove a 
defense against the itinerant marauder, but it would 
also prove somewhat bothersome to the cautious 
owner. 

There are Indians that still come and go along 
the Rim, but their tribes have not increased. Sav- 
ing the Navahos, they are no longer barbaric. Civi- 
lization has tamed them to a point of pauperism, 
and disease has wasted them. They are seen about 
the Canyon to-day only in odd groups that come in 
from Havasupai or the Painted Desert region to 
beg or barter. The old order has changed, giving 
place to a new that is no improvement so far as the 
Indian is concerned. 

But the Indian at the Canyon was never more 
than a bat clinging to a caverned wall. The Pale 
Face is not very different from him at the present 
time. Eventually, no doubt, the latter will "civi- 
lize" the whole Plateau Country, but that will not 
add to the glory of the Canyon. The iron rail and 
the bridge will supersede the trail and the ford, and 



204 THE GRAND CANYON 

perhaps many hotels will dull the memories of the 
cache and the wickiup, but we shall not profit 
thereby. Progress does not necessarily mean bet- 
terment. 



CHAPTER XVII 
THE DISCOVERY 

Every one in the southwest knows that the first 
white people to come into the Plateau Country were 
the Spaniards. They came up from Mexico, led by 
Coronado, and are sometimes referred to as the 
"conquistadores." They were on conquest bent, 
and toiled across the southern wastes with a deter- 
mination and an energy quite unparalleled. It was 
a desperate country through which to lead an ex- 
peditionary force. There was a dearth of food, 
forage, and, above all, of water. It was the desert 
— an arida zona, or, literally translated, an arid 
zone. Their name for the whole region has come 
down to us in contracted form, and is now the name 
of the State — ^Ari(da)zona. 

The first of the Spanish contingent to arrive was 
the famous Franciscan brother Fray Marcos de 
Niza, who was accompanied by Stephen, a negro 
guide. They came up from Culiacan in 1539, and 
the priest at least was less interested in the quest 
of gold than the quest of souls. The negro guide 
went ahead of the padre, and arrived at Cibola 
(now identified with Zuni), where he was taken 

205 



206 THE GRAND CANYON 

prisoner by the inhabitants. In attempting to 
escape he was killed. The padre saw Cibola only 
from a high distant hill, and when he returned to 
Mexico reported it as larger than the city of 
Mexico. Also the report was made that "on the 
portals of the principal houses there are many de- 
signs of turquoise stones, of which they have a 
great abundance; and the people in these cities are 
very well clothed." 

It was the account given by Fray Marcos on his 
return that started the next year the celebrated 
expedition of Coronado and his ensign Tovar.* 
They were gold-seekers and on conquest bent, with 
little love for the Indian, though they carried the 
cross. But they were not lacking in courage. 
Every one who has followed the trail of the "con- 
quistadores" has his profound admiration for their 
fortitude and endurance. Tovar and a detach- 
ment arrived at Cibola, and w^ere met by the In- 
dians there with presents of skins, corn-meal, nuts, 
birds, turquoises, cotton cloth. It was at Cibola 
that they heard of a large river lying "twenty days' 
journey" to the northwest, and when they returned 
to the main expedition, Cardenas and twelve men 
were detailed to ascertain the truth of the report. 
It was thus that Cardenas came to discover the 
Canyon. 

* The hotel at the Canyon is named for him. 



THE DISCOVERY 207 

Casteneda, in his Narrative of the Coronado ex- 
pedition, tells the story of Cardenas: 

*' After they had gone twenty days they came to 
the banks of the river, which seemed to be more 
than three or four leagues above the stream which 
flowed between them. This country was elevated 
and full of low, twisted pines, very cold and lying 
open to the north, so that this being the warm 
season, no one could live there on account of the 
cold. They spent three days on this bank looking 
for a passage down to the river, which looked from 
above as though the water was six feet across, al- 
though the Indians said it was half a league wide. 
It was impossible to descend, for after these three 
days, Captain Melgosa and one Juan Galeras and 
another companion, who were the three lightest 
and most agile men, made an attempt to go down 
at the least difficult place, and went down until those 
who were above were unable to keep sight of them. 
They returned about four o'clock in the afternoon, 
not having succeeded in reaching the bottom on 
account of the great difficulties which they found, 
because what seemed to be easy from above was not 
so, but instead very hard and difficult. They said 
that they had been down about a third of the way, 
and that the river seemed very large from the place 
which they reached, and that from what they saw 
they thought the Indians had given the width cor- 



208 THE GRAND CANYON 

rectly. Those who stayed above had estimated 
that some huge rocks on the sides of the cliffs 
seemed about as tall as a man, but those who went 
down swore that when they reached these rocks 
they were bigger than the great tower of Seville. 
They did not go farther up the river because they 
could not get water. Before this they had had to 
go a league or two inland every day, late in the 
evening, in order to find water, and the guides said 
that if they should go four days farther it would not 
be possible to go on because there was no water 
within three or four days. . . . This was the Tizon 
(Firebrand) River, much nearer its source than 
where Melchior Diaz and his company crossed 
it." * 

This description fits the Grand Canyon, but it 
would also apply to the Marble Canyon, or perhaps 
to the Canyon of the Little Colorado. It is not 
possible to say just where the Cardenas party came 
out, but it is very likely that the Indians took them 
to the Grand Canyon, and to a spectacular part of 
it, such as Comanche Point or thereabouts. If the 
present Zuni in New Mexico is the "Cibola'* of the 
Spaniards, then it is difficult to explain the "twenty 
days' journey" to the Canyon. It could have been 

* Casteneda's Narrative is published in both Spanish and 
English in the Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of 
Ethnology, Pt. I. Washington, 1892-1893. 




From a photograph by F. A. Lathe, copyrighted by the Atchison, Topeka and 
Santa Fe Railroad. 

Plate 33. WHERE CARDENAS FIRST SAW THE CANYON. 

From a point near Desert View. Colorado in middle distance, Painted 
Desert beyond to right. 



THE DISCOVEKY 209 

reached from Zuni in one-quarter of that time. 
But it is easier to imagine some error in the Narra- 
tive, or in its transmission, than to suppose the 
Cardenas party did not reach the Canyon. The 
Narrative calls the river the Tizon, which was the 
name given by Diaz to the Colorado below the 
Needles. 

Before Diaz the lower river had been navigated 
by Alarcon, but he went no higher up than the 
Needles. The Canyon part was as impossible for 
boats then as now, and Alarcon never saw it. After 
Diaz there is a long silence. Perhaps the very ex- 
istence of the Canyon had been forgotten when 
Fray Garces, who had a mission below Tucson, at 
San Xavier del Bac, came up into the province of 
Tusayan, carrying the cross to the Indians. This 
was in 1776, and during that summer Garces vis- 
ited the Havasupais in Cataract (Havasupai) Can- 
yon, probably going down there by the still-existent 
and somewhat perilous Wallapai Trail. After some 
days he came out and evidently travelled along the 
Rim of the Grand Canyon as far as the Little Colo- 
rado, which he crossed, and passed on to the Indian 
village of Oraibi. That village would not receive 
him, and he returned to the Canyon, and thus to 
his mission at San Xavier del Bac. 

After Garces there is another lapse of almost 
fifty years, during which there is little or no reliable 



210 THE GRAND CANYON 

report about the Canyon. The next discovery of 
it was probably by American trappers, who were 
naturally less interested in the Canyon than in the 
River and what it would produce. They were after 
pelts, and the River supplied them with beaver. 
This commercial phase of discovery brought about 
the exploration of the canyons on the upper River, 
but probably not the Grand Canyon proper. 

In 1824 General Ashley (a former Governor of 
Missouri) went into the fur trade with Andrew 
Henry, and established a camp in Green River 
Valley. Their expeditions by boat led them down 
the Colorado. Powell in 1869 found Ashley's name 
and date (1825) on a rock in Red Canyon. But the 
Ashley expedition ended in disappointment, if not 
in actual disaster, and was abandoned long before 
the Grand Canyon was reached. It is doubtful if 
any of the trappers — and there were many follow- 
ing or preceding Ashley — ever got as far as the 
Marble Canyon. There were too many rapids to 
run, too much danger and starvation on the way. 
They were not prepared for such a perilous expedi- 
tion, and one by one gave up as provisions began 
to run short. In any event, they added little to 
Canyon history. Others of their kind — notably 
the Patties, father and son — ^had come up the Colo- 
rado from below, travelling probably along the edge 
of the Grand Canyon, but, again, adding little to 



THE DISCOVERY 211 

the record. They were trappers, adventurers, who 
came and passed on, carrying the tale of the Canyon 
marvel with them. 

The expedition that followed after the trappers 
was governmental. Lieutenant Ives was sent by the 
War Department to explore the River above Yuma 
and find out whether it was a feasible way for 
carrying military supplies to the posts in New 
Mexico and Utah. He went up the stream in a 
steamboat, the Explorer, accompanied by twenty- 
four men and two artists — the latter making pic- 
tures of the route travelled. Ives went as far as 
Black Canyon, whither one Johnson had preceded 
him, and there his Explorer struck a rock. The 
boat was sent back to Fort Yuma, and Ives took a 
pack-train and went on to the Grand Canyon. 
He visited the Havasupais in Cataract Canyon, 
going down the Wallapai Trail, as Fray Garces be- 
fore him. Then he passed over to the San Fran- 
cisco Mountains, crossed the Little Colorado, and 
visited the Mokis, again probably following the 
Garces trail. He wrote a report of his trip that 
makes interesting reading,* It contains many pen 
pictures, for the Lieutenant was much impressed 
with the Canyon grandeur, and yet he thought it 
so remote and lonely that it would be " forever un- 

*Ives, J. C, Report Upon the Colorado River of the West, 
pp. 13-131. Washington, 1861. 



212 THE GRAND CANYON 

visited and undisturbed." Wherein he apparently 
failed to reckon with the American tourist. 

In 1859 Captain Macomb was sent to examine the 
junction of the Green and Grand Rivers. Doctor 
Newberry, who had been with Ives, accompanied 
Macomb. Nothing of importance relating to the 
Grand Canyon portion of the stream came out of 
it. At the end of the Civil War miners found their 
way into the lower Canyon, but neither did any 
report of value come from them. Dellenbaugh tells 
the tale of these various expeditions as leading up 
to the real exploration of the River, which was un- 
dertaken by Major Powell in 1869. Dellenbaugh's 
story* is more than interesting because he accom- 
panied Powell on his second expedition in 1871- 
1872, and he speaks with knowledge and authority. 

Powell's expeditions were those of an explorer- 
scientist. It would be difficult to say which was 
the greater in him, the spirit of the adventurer or 
the curiosity of the geologist. Apparently the tales 
told of Canyon dangers spurred him on. The In- 
dians had given out stories of canoe parties that 
went down the Colorado and were overwhelmed by 
the waters, of underground passages where the 
great stream disappeared for hundreds of miles, 
and of high enclosing walls that only the eagles 

* Dellenbaugh, F. S., A Canyon Voyage. New York, 1908. 
The Romance of the Colorado River. New York, 1909. 




Plate 34. GRAND CANYON REGION. 



THE DISCOVERY 213 

could surmount. They warned Powell against en- 
tering the gorge. It was contempt of the gods. 
But nothing stopped him. From Green River City 
in Wyoming he drove through in boats for a thou- 
sand miles to the mouth of the River Virgin, beyond 
the Grand Canyon. On his second expedition in 
1871 he went as far as Kanab Canyon. These were 
the first scientific explorations of the canyons by 
way of the River. The account should be read in 
the original and not in a paraphrase.* 

After Poweirs day a number of expeditions were 
fitted out from time to time with the avowed in- 
tention of "going through the Canyon." The feat 
had been heralded as "dangerous," "difficult," "im- 
possible," and that advertisement naturally drew 
the attention of some who were disposed to run 
risks in accepting dares. In 1889 Frank M. Brown, 
surveying for a railway along the River, led a party 
as far as the Marble Canyon, where he lost his life 
in runmng a rapid. Robert Stanton, who had been 
with Brown, got through to the Gulf of California 
the next year. In 1897 a trapper named Gilloway 
went through as far as the Needles. Since then 
several expeditions, notably one of the Kolb brothers, 
who made moving pictures of their voyage, have 
been undertaken with more or less success. At the 

* Powell, J. W., Exploration of the Colorado River of the 
West. WashingtoHi 1875. 



214 THE GRAND CANYON 

present time the Canyon region is fairly well known 
both topographically and geologically. The trip by 
boat is still dangerous, and adventurous people no 
doubt will continue to make it, but so far as science 
or exploration is concerned the risk is neither neces- 
sary nor worth while. 

The conquistadores, the padres, the trappers, the 
explorers, the geologists, having had their day and 
said their accustomed say, who should come upon 
the scene but the artist and the writer, with their 
whilom auditor and follower, the tourist. Its use- 
lessness in commerce or agriculture having been for 
the moment demonstrated, the Canyon has been 
hailed as a thing of beauty, and both the brush and 
the pen have been called into service to picture it. 
The first of the brushmen, Eggloffstein and MoU- 
hausen, were with Ives, and their truth of represen- 
tation has been called into question. They were 
obsessed with the Diisseldorf way of presenting a 
picture pattern, and rather conventionalized or Ger- 
manized the Canyon. After them came W. H. 
Holmes, who did the wonderfully accurate and de- 
tailed plates that accompany Button's report.* 
The Holmes pictures are admirable illustrations 
and deserve great praise for their topographical 
truth. They are in a class with Audubon's Birds 

* Dutton, C. E., Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon Dis- 
trict. Washington, 1882. 



THE DISCOVERY 215 

of America and possess the same excellences of 
characterization. 

Holmes had been preceded in topographical and 
spectacular landscape by F. E. Church, who as 
early as 1853 went to South America and sketched 
the Andes, afterward becoming famous for such 
pictures as the "Heart of the Andes." After 
Church came Albert Bierstadt, who in 1858 made his 
first sketching- tour in the Rocky Mountains, accom- 
panying General Lander's overland expedition to 
establish a wagon- trail to the Pacific. Bierstadt 
later on painted the Yellowstone, the Yosemite, 
and other Western scenes, achieving a great repu- 
tation thereby. Thomas Moran was also brought 
under the spell of Western landscape as early as 
1871, when he accompanied a government expedi- 
tion to the Yellowstone region. In 1874 he began 
painting the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, and 
since then he has done many famous pictures of 
"the great chasm," as it was formerly called. 

Moran's name is associated with the Grand 
Canyon, as Bierstadt's with the Yosemite, and 
Church's with the Andes. They all painted the 
panoramic and the spectacular, and they all at- 
tained a truth of scale and perspective more or less 
monumental and impressive. Moran was perhaps 
the best painter of the three; but even in his work 
there is the feeling of the merely "mappy" and the 



216 THE GRAND CANYON 

topographic that rather crowds out the sesthetic 
and the pictorial. In all of these pictures or " views '* 
the form becomes too dominant for anything like 
sensuous seeing. In fact, the panoramic is a genre 
of its own — something exceptionally obdurate in 
art. 

Scores of painters have had a try at the Canyon 
since Moran first blazed the road, but, as a whole, 
they have not greatly improved upon him. Only 
of recent years have they taken up the problem in 
an interpretative way. The modern tendency in 
dealing with it is to follow up suggestion rather than 
realization. Impressionism, in its rightful mean- 
ing of giving the realistic or objective impression of 
the fact, is possibly the better method of procedure. 
It is doubtful if sentiment or emotion, or a too 
subjective treatment of any kind, can avail much 
with such colossal forms and colors as the Canyon 
presents. The purely decorative treatment fares 
no better. You cannot turn the Canyon into a 
tone of color, or arrange it as a merely graceful pat- 
tern of form, without distorting truth and falling 
into insipidity. Indeed, there are many difficul- 
ties in the way of the individual who would put the 
Canyon on canvas. More than one painter has 
come to grief over it. 

Just so with the poets. The bookman fares no 
better than the brushman. Many a poet has come 



THE DISCOVERY 217 

away from the Canyon with a fine frenzy in his eye 
and a thick feeling in his throat, but by the time 
he has his emotion down on paper it has proved 
merely a disjointed rhapsody. You cannot absorb 
the Canyon mentally and body it forth in verse 
as you do the New England mill-pond or the 
poppies in Flanders fields. The mass of form and 
color, the bewildering display of light, are baffling. 
For all the verseful eulogies and rhythmic odes, the 
beauty of the depth remains unrevealed, its splendor 
not half told. The Canyon still lacks a poet. 

Even the people who write prose, and are not 
popularly supposed to be bothered with fine fren- 
zies, have their troubles in describing the Canyon. 
They have not enough adjectives to go around or 
to reach up and over. Language fails them. The 
tourist who comes out to the Rim for the first time 
and exclaims "Good God!'' comes as near descrip- 
tion as the more elaborately wordy if by his excla- 
mation he means not only his own surprise but the 
greatness and goodness of God. One can, of course, 
particularize, and grow wearisome in doing so, 
without reaching expression. Every writer dreads 
falling into that slough. And, in any event, in the 
final analysis he must realize that, with the Can- 
yon for a theme, he has not reached up high enough. 
His difficulties are those of the early explorers. 
The Canyon is practically impossible. 



218 THE GRAND CANYON 

The great chasm cannot be successfully exploited 
commercially or artistically. It cannot be ploughed 
or plotted or poetized or painted. It is too big for 
us to do more than creep along the Rim and wonder 
over it. Perhaps that is not cause for lamentation. 
Some things should be beyond us — aspired to but 
never attained. The great goddess Nature, stand- 
ing here in her majestic splendor, may be seen, ad- 
mired, and loved. What more would we? Why 
should we wish to jostle her familiarly or even so 
much as touch the hem of her golden garmenting? 
Wrapped in her purple mists and under her blue 
immensity of sky, she should rest forever aloof and 
inviolate. The mystery that surrounds her should 
remain a mystery. 

As for our wonder, it is a natural inheritance. 
We opened our eyes upon the world with awe and 
we close them at the last groping our way in starry 
spaces. May it never cease ! With definite knowl- 
edge one abandons interest. The world becomes 
commonplace. 



U 



s 



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Neutralizing Agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: 

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